CRM In Healthcare: Is It As Dirty As It Sounds?
It is more than just for sales
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool? If you are not in sales you might not be familiar with them. It’s a powerful tool if wielded by the right person.
One of the most popular CRMs is Salesforce. Their stock ticker is literally CRM. On their website, they describe it as:
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships to grow your business. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Now let’s just replace the word “customer” with “patient.” Are you starting to see it?
What can a CRM do in healthcare?
Scheduling - You can automate scheduling.
Patient engagement - Set reminders or automatically send your patients relevant information at different parts of their healthcare journey.
Preventative care - Filter your patients for appropriate screenings and preventative care.
Disease management - Trend labs and imaging to see if the patient is on the right track.
Reports and analytics - Easily run reports about your practice’s revenue to how well your diabetic patients are doing
Messaging - Send and receive messages from your patients or anyone on your team.
This all sounds too good to be true. Well, it is not. This can all be done. It is just a matter of implementing the solution and workflows properly.
How can it do all these things? A CRM at its basic is a relational database. And as long as you have good data modeling and standard data you can really do anything. It is like using a pivot table. It is supremely powerful but if you have columns with non-standard data the pivot table will become worthless.
The perfect implementation
Let’s talk about what a perfect CRM implementation could look like.
Scheduling:
You have a patient reach out to you via your website and they need an appointment. They can either schedule an appointment right there or send you a message stating why they want to see you and providing times that are best suitable for them.
Your scheduler gets said message and triages their appointment to the correct time slots. Then an automated message is sent to the patient via their preferred method.
They still want to call and talk to you. No worries since you have automated the majority of your appointment your scheduler has time to talk to them.
Patient Intake:
This is where CRMs shine! They are literally designed for this.
This can be done in various ways all of which are better than the paper and clipboard.
They can fill out the form at the point of scheduling. They could be sent a message or an email to fill out their form online after scheduling. Let’s say they made it to your office without filling out the paperwork then you could use your clipboard or maybe have a check-in kiosk where they aren’t allowed to check in unless they fill out the form. That way all the information is automatically entered into your CRM!
Appointment:
Before or even during the clinician sees the patient they can look them up and be presented with a dashboard that provides the necessary information they need. If you really wanted to you could add notes etc.
Follow up:
After the appointment, you want to follow up with the patient. Just simply write when you do and they will get a message or have a scheduled call with one of your staff on that date.
You could also send appointment reminders for patients you haven’t seen in a year. Or you run a report and your patient is a candidate for preventive care such as a mammogram or other screenings.
All of these steps could be automated even more with the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots.
Does this CRM exist at this moment in time? Not exactly but it could if there was enough demand and the right people at the helm.
A CRM is all about relationship management. Healthcare is also about relationship management. I would argue that is our main job. To manage our relationship with our patients and peers. We have to build that relationship to build trust with our patients.
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I hope you have a great day!
This would help get rid of the fax machine too :-)