There is no question that investing in medical equipment and trained staff is crucial for clinics and hospitals. However, it is equally important that the needs and interests of their customers are attended to. Investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution enables you to better serve your patients, provide quality care, boost internal efficiency and also protect data.

According to a MarketsandMarkets report, the global healthcare CRM market is estimated to reach $17.4 billion by 2023, from $8.8 billion in 2018. This demonstrates how imperative these systems are becoming with the industry, meaning that those who fail to adapt are left behind.

For healthcare providers, keeping track of who your patients are, what medications they are on, who else provides their care, what care have they received in the past, communication preferences and other key pieces of information all help you to build a picture of your patients and therefore provide better service.

What is Healthcare CRM?

Just like a normal CRM system, you can manage information and track communications. However, the entities are much more specific to healthcare organisations – managing patients and their health information efficiently.

• Patient Management: This enables staff to add or update patient records, segment patients to target groups based on conditions, and effectively communicate with patients.
• Communication: Schedule, initiate, and track interactions with patients. Also set reminders and schedule and confirm appointments.
• Task management: Add tasks, assign them to people, view and update them, and track their progress, deadlines, priorities, and completion.
• Reporting: Generate and customise various reports, such as reports that track ROI for campaigns or reports on the average number of patient no-shows.

With a bespoke solution, additional functionality can be added/taken away where required, meeting the ever-changing needs of an organisation.

Who Can Benefit From a Healthcare CRM?

Here are the main types of clinics and hospitals that can benefit from a healthcare CRM system:

• Retail health clinics
• Primary care offices and primary care physicians
• Urgent care centers
• Emergency departments
• Hospitals
• Outpatient medical centers

Any healthcare establishment can use a CRM to manage patient information more efficiently.

The Benefits of Using a Healthcare CRM

Enhances customer experience

Today, customers used to getting a tailored approach in most elements of their lives and that doesn’t stop when it comes to healthcare. Dealing with hundreds of patient’s day in, day out, there is no doubt it is easy to forget about following a patient up, let alone remembering everyone’s names/conditions/medications. A CRM solution keeps track of all this information and the notes associated with each patient, improving your general patient satisfaction.

Improving personalisation is one element of this. A CRM system stores information about a patients age, birthday, gender, profession, and more alongside their standard health data. With this data, you can send out personalised communications, informing them about specific news that might be of interest to them, reminders about appointments or follow-up actions to a previous call. These actions make patients feel valued and improve their satisfaction with your organisation.

On top of this, reminding patients about their appointments in advance helps to reduce wait times.  More than 60% of doctors claim the biggest reason they run behind schedule is patients arriving later than their appointment times, so notifying patients beforehand will help doctors follow their schedules more efficiently.

Eliminates administrative errors

Did you know that 60% of surveyed patients have had to retake tests because the initial results were lost?

As customer satisfaction becomes increasingly more important than ever before, statistics like this cannot continue. The need to reduce errors and provide better service is urgent these days. A CRM solution in the healthcare industry solves these problems. By automating the majority of administrative processes, human interactions are minimised – the main cause of errors. In addition to this, the system informs staff about all information that needs to be entered and all activities that need to be done, so nothing is missed off.

Facilitates communications

Poor communication between clinics, doctors and patients results in poor patient satisfaction, insufficient treatment and the re-emergence of issues. Often, people will be required to repeat their medical history to several people, re-do the same tests that have previously done, or be passed around between departments until someone can help. Each of these unnecessary steps degrades the quality of care along the way.

A healthcare CRM has plenty of functionality which facilitates the communication between all stakeholders, resolving the above issues. One of the biggest challenges is keeping track of notes and conversations which are easily accessible when needed. A CRM system allows employees to add every conversation, email, call, text, etc, to a patient record which can then be accessed quickly and easily.

Provides insights on patients to create better marketing campaigns

In order to provide a better quality of care, improve services, and build strong and loyal relationships with patients, all healthcare organisations should know who their customers are, what they need, and what their preferences are.

Using a CRM, you are able to track patient satisfaction, campaign responsiveness and the likelihood of them referring their doctor/clinic to family and friends. By leveraging survey functionality within your CRM, such as Microsoft Forms Pro for Dynamics 365, you can gather this data using an automated survey.

What next?

If you are looking to implement a CRM in your healthcare organisation, it is crucial to understand your requirements and goals beforehand, ensuring that the software you select meets your needs. There are plenty of vendors out there which are designed specifically for the healthcare sector and will meet the specific requirements of hospitals and patients. Choosing the right partner/vendor is crucial to the success of your CRM project, so our advice is to not rush this stage and do your research.

This is not just a trend that will pass, CRM solutions in the healthcare industry are here to stay, with real-world results backing up the success of implementing one.