While you are primarily in the healthcare business, part of your work as a medical office manager also has to do with “customer service” (even though in this case, of course, the customers are referred to as “patients"). And savvy business people are aware that one of the keys to success in any operation is maintaining if not boosting engagement with the people being served.
That’s why all serious modern business activity and its associated marketing involve some level of customer relationship management. There are software tools on the market that are dedicated to CRM tasks for professionals as well as beginners to use in keeping tabs on customer activity, so there is no real obstacle in getting started, even if you are a novice. And busy managers can always keep in mind that they can hire third party professionals to assist with setting up, maintaining, and improving CRM programs to boost business.
Focus on your productivity and putting those in your care first, while the healthcare CRM software tracks your marketing activity.
When you work in medicine, you’ll need to use state-of-the-art healthcare CRM software if you want to remain competitive with other local practices. It makes sense to deploy CRM in a medical practice, because it gives you special insight into your patients, especially when you already use electronic health record and/or practice management software.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Healthcare CRM?
A healthcare CRM helps in measuring how successful your engagement tactics are, using customizable reports that you develop just for your organization. It also enables you to segment the patient population so you can analyze and then understand them more precisely. Prudent office managers will use a healthcare CRM to measure and keep track of multi-channel sales tactics, including SMS messaging, email and traditional surface mail, depending on the demographics of the population they serve. (Older patients might respond more readily to actual printed mail that is delivered to their home, for example, while busier and younger patients will tend to want to receive this information in digital format.)
The CRM enables your team to plan and then execute marketing campaigns more strategically by harnessing insights into the data you gather and store. This is enormously beneficial for taking immediate action in your outreach efforts.
Patient engagement is enhanced with a healthcare CRM, because it allows for tailor made outreach addressing each patient specifically by name and in accordance with the segmenting you selected (based on the data you gather and store on each patient). What’s more, you now have an easy reporting system for the data, with reports to be based on the criteria and goals you and your stakeholders establish.
You can count on the healthcare CRM to help you create a complete view of patients as it integrates information from multiple sources (your EHR, patient satisfaction surveys, and so on) for an integrated profile.
A healthcare CRM will, at its foundation, allow you to generate reports and customize dashboards, conduct direct mail campaigns, integrate with your existing applications, function on multiple platforms, and provide complete customer management services.
With all that in mind, here are the features that should be included in the healthcare CRM application you wind up implementing:
Feature 1: Reports and Dashboards
The CRM needs to have the ability to create customized reports and analyze data and statistics. You’ll need to know, for example, what the open rate is on email that you send to various groups of patients. You might discover that senior patients living in one ZIP code are far less responsive to reminders to come in for a pneumonia vaccination that come by email, but because they all use smartphones, they are happy to get SMS text messages to make an appointment.
Feature 2: Direct Mail Campaigns
This allows you to send mail to patients and prospects to remind them about appointments or market your practice. Potential patients who visited your website and expressed interest are candidates for “introduction to our medical office” type of greeting emails. Parents will get reminders to bring their children in for vaccinations before school season begins, and so on.
Feature 3: Ability to Integrate with Existing Software
Your new healthcare CRM must be able to integrate with your practice’s current applications, including your electronic health record or EHR software, practice management or PM application, and other software, such as a radiology information system or whatever specialties you cater to.
Feature 4: Multi-Platform
You don’t want to be limited to just the desktop computer -- a good CRM will be available in the cloud. This allows your doctor to access or input data while away from the office, such as when doing rounds at your affiliated hospital. Or, a nurse practitioner needs to check on a patient’s chart while in another part of the building, so she uses her tablet instead of trudging back to the office to use a desktop computer.
Feature 5: All-around Customer Management
This benefit might seem obvious, but it’s not enough to just be able to store customer contact information in a CRM. Your staff needs to be able to track medications, appointments, notes on patients and other details to build up a complete and integrated picture of each one of them. It’s trivial for software to process all the data that previously would have been unmanageable for your team if you tried to do this without computers!
From tailor made report generation to customizable dashboards for ease of use by your staff, to the ability to wage direct mail campaigns with a high degree of precision, a healthcare CRM solution is just what your practice needs to take it to the next level of success. Keep in mind that the CRM should integrate well with your existing software and it should be multi-platform for convenient access.
Key Takeaway
- Using a healthcare customer relationship management or CRM application is crucial for any medical practice today.
- Your patients need as much care and attention as the customers served by any local business, and a CRM is designed to boost your engagement with them all.
- A healthcare CRM should help you segment and then target different patient groups with direct mail, email, and SMS texts.
- Make sure that the CRM will integrate well with your existing software solutions.
- It’s best to work with a healthcare CRM that works on multiple platforms (tablet, smartphone, and desktop) for easier access by your team, especially when they are out and about.
- Use the healthcare CRM solution to track all aspects of your patients, from medications needing refills to reminders about upcoming appointments.
The more you learn about the latest in healthcare CRM software, the more it becomes obvious that it has the features your organization needs to maintain that all-important engagement with your patients. To gain more insight into how this software solution will integrate with your practice’s existing applications, it pays to view a demonstration in action rather than just reading about how it works. You can get started now. Simply click here to schedule a live healthcare CRM demo today.
