Often termed as a universal marketing tool for providers, Healthcare CRM is highly used for different purposes these days. Successful survival always asks for adoption and evolution and healthcare industry is no more an exception. To provide better customer services, professionals require to put in the effort to keep up.

A few months back, a report was published by Chilmark Research on how the healthcare industry requires to consider patient engagement technology as the first priority. Also referred to as Patient Relationship Management (PRM), Healthcare CRM mainly helps in setting up the entire focus of the organization in meeting the patient needs and requirements. According to the Grand View Research , the global healthcare CRM market was worth $6.6 billion in 2015 and anticipates it to grow at a CAGR of 9.5% by 2025.

Gone are the days where we need to go through those boring long check-ups at the beginning of each visit. With the seamless integration and regular updation of patient’s electronic health records, everything turns out to be simpler and better for doctors as well as patients. Right from improving the quality of care to lowering the costs, effective utilization of patient’s information, healthcare CRM offers a plethora of tangible benefits like never before.

How Hospitals Use the CRM Tech?

One of the main reasons why hospitals emphasize largely on patient communication is due to the high complexity in the hospital infrastructure, inheriting such systems that harness the provider’s other needs is the best thing to do. Besides, technology is more than a fad, it has become an integral part of our lives. Hence, it must be used in patient engagement, preventive care, and population health.

With the help of outpatient centers, health care providers can become highly proactive. This kind of centers will end up intentionally luring patients to indulge into a load of necessary checks, tests, and procedures. This will develop a patient’s loyalty and trust.

How Does Healthcare CRM / PRM Help?

Generally, many of you end up googling out the symptoms whenever require a quick relief or need to self-diagnose. In fact, the rise in the digital era has resulted in the high emergence of the health queries at search engines. The only challenge is how to integrate, analyze and apply correctly such data to gain meaningful insights? Here’s when Healthcare CRM comes to play. The platform highly based on centralized healthcare data hub has the potential to retain customers like never before.

As the name itself implies, PRM is all about managing relations between patients, physicians, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies etc. This is successfully done by several means of communications such as reminders regarding the doctor’s appointment, missed medication alerts, health tips, educating the patients, event reminders regarding health camps, wellness lectures etc. The key areas where the technology can benefit include:

Segment Information

Staring from demographics to psychographics, social, behavioral, etc, CRM can successfully segment a patient’s information so that right procedure is followed for a cure. By simply optimizing and measuring multichannel, healthcare firms won’t just be able to empower patients and enable them in proactive, informed decision-making.

Data Integration

Like I said before, an organization must consider having a centralized data repository when it’s about integrating data from several forms such as contact centers, marketing, electronic medical records, health surveys, administrative data, clinical notes and so more. As a result, a complete overview of any patient encompassing the entire patient lifecycle can be developed.

Implementation

There are two ways in which healthcare CRM technology can be implemented.

• In patient CRM– Activities when a patient gets treatment in the hospital and avail all its facilities further. Here employees must take care whether the patient is satisfied with your services or not. Proper training and clear instructions must be given for further improvement.
• Out patient CRM– As soon as a patient is discharged from the hospital, professionals require to maintain and strengthen their relationship further. So, what can be done is? Simply maintaining a computerized database of every patient with all the relevant information. This includes his or her medical history, scheduled appointments, frequency of visits etc. So that you can send reminders for their future appointments and treatments.

On and all, Healthcare CRM is a value-added service to its patients and creating customer delight and improving customer loyalty.