CRM Expansion into the Healthcare Market
Up until 2020, in-person healthcare services were the standard for patient engagement. The pandemic restrictions limited patients’ face-to-face interactions with their healthcare providers, including doctor’s visits, surgeries, and even prescription pickups. The healthcare industry transitioned quickly to a new process with virtual support accelerating telehealth solutions. Health organizations needed to embrace this new wave with a database to store, protect, and organize patient information while communicating remotely. Customer relationship management software already existed and comprised the necessary healthcare providers’ critical capabilities to create an always-on patient engagement solution. Thus, patient CRM began to boom.
The global healthcare CRM market is forecasted to reach $17.4 billion by 2023, according to MarketsAndMarkets.
How Patients Benefit
Customer relationship management solutions used in healthcare allows patients and providers to easily share information in a centralized integration point, providing better security, access control, convenience, and data accuracy. On all platforms, the software promotes collaboration between healthcare colleagues and enhances data insights to improve decision-making and efficiencies regarding the organization and, most importantly, its patients.
Similar to customer journey analytics software, patient CRM was created to manage the patient journey in one centralized database and unify patient data effectively across all channels and devices, starting from their first interaction with a healthcare company.
One goal of patient CRM software is to retain existing patients and bring in new ones. The software gathers and organizes patient data such as demographics, financial details, medical history, interactions with the company website, patient communication preferences, and other related healthcare information. Each patient is created as a comprehensive, detailed profile on the software platform, which provides more effective information within healthcare systems and promotes patient engagement with their data.
Patient CRM also vastly expands the possibility of direct communication with existing and prospective patients by supporting mailing campaigns. Campaigns might include an automatic welcome email sent to healthcare website visitors, reminders about flu shots or other vaccinations, and other informative communications.
A major benefit of patient CRM, according to G2, is “the encouragement and emphasis of active patient participation towards their health.” Recent research shows that patients who are more involved in their healthcare journey have better health outcomes and overall care experiences.
Patient CRM creates care centered around the patient by improving access and the flow of communication between patients and their care providers. It tracks patient experiences with the provider through storing records, clinical documentation, prescriptions, and other relevant information in one easily accessible location for patients to view. Data analytics can even identify patients who might need services or those who haven’t attended an appointment for an extended period.
Build Your Team to Support Patient Engagement
Once implemented, no matter the platform selected, building a support team with the experience, dedication, and understanding to create the patient engagement experience and maintain the platform daily. Although many tools are created for a simple user interface, creating a synced, personalized, patient-focused journey takes employees that understand your organization best.
Like the support team aligned with a business CRM, we have seen healthcare roles with similar support needs for Client Relationship Engagement Administrator, UI/UX Designer, UI/UX Product Managers, iOS & Android Mobile Engineers/Developers, Marketing Automation & Patient Engagement content creation.
Sample Patient CRM Administrator Role Responsibilities:
Providing application administration and production support. Recurring CRM platform maintenance; solving and tracing the root cause of issues in the software. Instituting and managing a database of contacts, communications, medical history, and healthcare information. Using Agile/Scrum methodology and Jira to organize tasks. And overseeing customizations and configuration changes for the platform.
Popular CRM Solutions on the Market
Thankfully many existing CRM platforms have expanded into the healthcare market, creating a healthcare-specific model that works across providers, payers, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and machine device companies. With the expansion, healthcare companies benefit from years of training materials, standardizations for workflow processes, and automation to capitalize upon, plus tenured experienced CRM Administrators across multiple industries now invaluable for healthcare. Salesforce Health Cloud and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare are two widely used patient CRM software systems.
Salesforce Health Cloud provides the same effective CRM features of Salesforce business solution, with additional features specific to healthcare: secured communication, patient registration, member enrollment, scheduling, and reminders. The system is built in a payer-specific model, which includes an easier data management system for claims payments from health plans.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare combines the features of the CRM program Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Azure into one patient-centric interface. The software offers tools that schedule home visits, coordinate care, and treatment plans, and assist patients with additional inquiries. It also seamlessly syncs with Microsoft Outlook, which makes calendar scheduling and emails even simpler.
Other patient CRM software includes Zendesk Sell, BestNotes, Influx MD, and HIPAA CRM.
We have teams that crossover between IT and healthcare with over 15 years of expertise in the two industries and prepared to find candidates for your essential healthcare roles. Reach out today to access our network of over 2.5 professionals.
About the Author
Scott Galanos
SVP, Healthcare
Scott Galanos is a Senior Vice President for Addison Group’s Healthcare division where his focus is to network with leaders from a variety of different healthcare organizations. Scott prides himself on being able to build rapport and long-standing relationships with various healthcare leaders to assist with staff augmentation and building their cultures.
Throughout his career, Scott has spoken at various networking groups such as AAPC, aIPAM, COHAM, IL-HIMA and is a past President of COHAM.
