Customer relationship management (CRM) allows organizations to monitor their patient database, and understand who their customers are, along with their behavior. As a result, a CRM strategy enables businesses to analyze and predict their customer needs and design solutions to meet those needs. In healthcare, CRM helps providers and organizations acquire, engage, retain, and learn more about the patients they serve. CRM software optimizes workflows and strengthens relationships with patients.
CRM software can support many aspects of a healthcare organization’s operations. Customer management, data organization, scheduling, and reporting bring patient information together in a single location to streamline administrative processes. Healthcare CRMs can now integrate with electronic medical records (EMRs) or electronic health records (EHRs) and comply with federal security and privacy standards. It helps providers with patient engagement through appointment reminders, patient surveys, and streamlining mailing and marketing campaigns. A high-quality CRM supports providers and care teams and can result in increased patient satisfaction, better health outcomes, more effective delivery of care, and reduced costs.
Simplified operational and administrative workflows are a major benefit of healthcare CRMs. In addition to the tasks mentioned above, healthcare CRMs can automate patient check-in/check-out, prescription refills, clinical escalations, medical record transfers, and other organizational focuses. Replacing time-intensive manual processes with CRM functionality can lower costs, allow providers and care teams to engage more with patients, and improve patient outcomes over time.
Healthcare CRM software can help providers schedule and organize appointments. As well as address a frustrating aspect of delivering care — missed appointments. Providers can set up a healthcare CRM to send automatic reminders of a patient’s next and future appointments. Based on patient preferences, providers can send reminders via email, phone call, or text message.
Provider quality scores are tied to patient feedback, and a healthcare CRM helps collect valuable feedback from patients in real time. Gathering input on potential issues and areas of improvement, as well as what contributes to a positive patient experience, is critical. Healthcare CRMs can automate survey and feedback forms, as well as generate reports and dashboards to reflect results. This capability helps providers and organizations continuously improve services and patient experience.
CRM technology across industries intends to help businesses and organizations understand their customers better. In healthcare, CRMs can identify patterns, such as which acquisition and retention strategies are most successful. Healthcare CRMs can also provide more detail on individual patient characteristics, such as patient vitals over time, identification of family caregivers and supports, feedback on outcomes and experience, and engagement through various communication channels. This additional information gives providers more context for their patients and a better perspective on delivering patient-specific care.
It can also help track population analytics, like location, what populations are enrolled in which programs, how many patients each care team member has, etc. You can also plug your CRM into more advanced analytics tool to further analyze your population.
Healthcare CRMs must meet stringent security requirements. User-specific roles and access keep patient information secure. While providers and organizations manage data feeds from multiple sources and records, a healthcare CRM with an all-in-one database approach provides a comprehensive, safe environment for all patient data. Healthcare CRMs also automate data-collection processes. Reducing the burden of manual data collection offers more security, reduces the risk of error, and centralizes all documentation to be easily accessible.
Healthcare CRMs must be HIPAA compliant and maintain a secure environment in order to store a patient’s protected health information (PHI). In addition to securing PHI, HIPAA requires healthcare organizations to exchange electronic health records (EHRs) more efficiently. HIPAA-compliant CRMs also protect healthcare organizations against cyberattacks through components like encryption controls and secure designated access roles. Email spam and web filters prevent phishing attacks, which trick employees into opening a malicious file or visiting a malicious website and enabling access to a data system.
Integration with other platforms can extend the benefit of a healthcare CRM. Care providers can incorporate telehealth, prescribing, patient counseling, ordering labs, data management, and many other functions through integration with third-party applications. Welkin supports both native and custom-built integrations to deliver a fully customized approach for healthcare organizations.
While healthcare CRMs typically focus on the broad goal of managing and collecting patient information, most fall into one of three categories: analytical, collaborative, or operational.
Analytical healthcare CRMs collect and store patient information and primarily focus on analyzing that information. Reviewing and analyzing data such as demographic information, medication history, family history, allergies, and other health data allows providers and care teams to take a patient-centered approach to care and engagement.
Collaborative healthcare CRMs are generally aimed at supporting large organizations with multiple divisions and decentralized operations. Collaborative healthcare CRMs help to define specific roles, share information across the organization, and manage multiple communication channels across the entire patient population. The data collected across an organization’s divisions, along with patient communications, allows for the creation of personalized approaches to suit the preferences of each patient.
Streamlining and automating key operational activities is the primary focus of an operational healthcare CRM. In addition to traditional marketing strategies like patient acquisition, conversion, and retention, healthcare CRMs also automate provider and care team processes that can be time-intensive and repetitive. Optimizing workflows and tasks helps to maximize productivity and frees up more time for direct patient care.
Healthcare CRMs let providers and care teams build deeper relationships with patients. The CRM itself brings together patient health records from various sources and synchronizes data and information, providing a comprehensive view of a patient’s health data. Providers and care teams can better understand patient needs, identify behavior patterns, review prior diagnoses and procedures, and deliver patient-centered care plans. Healthcare CRMs also support meaningful patient engagement before and after office visits and allow providers to help patients to manage their health better.
Care teams cannot deliver true patient-centered care without a complete picture of a patient’s medical history. Healthcare CRMs centralize patient information for care teams. Combined with the marketing and communication capabilities of a CRM, care teams can tailor interactions to a patient’s specific healthcare needs and communication preferences. Healthcare CRMs enable organizations to offer a customized approach to engaging with every patient.
Acquiring, retaining, and engaging patients can be a major hurdle for healthcare organizations. Healthcare CRMs empower providers and care teams to specifically tailor approaches that incorporate customized messages, emails, and newsletters specific to their condition, insurance, and preferences. Patients who feel understood are more likely to stay with their provider and establish a strong relationship. In the long run, this type of marketing can even impact a patient’s health outcomes and overall experience.
Healthcare CRMs enable better care delivery through administrative and operational functions as well. Automation frees up clinical and administrative staff to focus on patient care and engagement. CRMs also streamline care management efforts for providers and care teams and can support the delivery of personalized care through workflows and resources within the platform.
Healthcare CRMs help providers and care teams to save time, money, and effort. Improving workflow and task automation for providers and care teams reduces the time needed for administrative and operational tasks. This capability of CRMs provides care team members more time to focus on clinical activities and patient engagement. Deploying a healthcare CRM allows providers to see increased patient satisfaction, better health outcomes, more effective care delivery, and reduced costs.
If you’re looking for a solution, Welkin Healths’ healthcare CRM can help! For starters, automate tasks and processes, including patient intake forms, assessments, escalation pathways and provider notifications, patient and provider communications, team alerts, email sequences, and appointment and reminder scheduling. We provide all of the benefits that we’ve outlined in this article and more.
Interested in learning more about automating these tasks and freeing up more time for providers and staff? Book a demo to discover how Welkin can be your healthcare CRM partner.
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