Powerful Benefits of Implement a CRM in healthcare industry

When purchasing expensive medical equipment and investing in employees, modern clinics and hospitals still ignore customer experience and customer satisfaction, one of the most important keys to success. Of course, complex furniture is important, but what to do if analysis results are lost due to management errors, data leaks or even medical errors?
What if we told you that there is a solution to reduce all these errors, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, and reduce maintenance costs? The solution is a healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) system.

What’s a healthcare CRM?

Customer relationship management software in the healthcare industry allows medical centers to successfully manage patients and all their health information. Just like a CRM system for sales, a healthcare CRM system has some standard modules.
• Communication module. This module has the ability to plan, initiate and track interactions with patients. It also has the ability to set reminders, schedule and confirm appointments.
• Task management module. This module allows employees to add tasks, assign tasks to people, view and update tasks, and track their progress, deadlines, priorities, and completions.
• Reporting module. This module enables you to generate and customize various reports, such as a report that tracks the return on investment for an activity or a report on the average number of patient misses.
At the same time, healthcare CRM includes some specific functions necessary for the healthcare industry:

• Patient management module. This module allows employees to add or update patient records, subdivide patients into target groups as appropriate, and communicate effectively with patients.

This feature set is basic. But it can be modified according to the needs of each specific medical institution.

Who can get benefit from healthcare CRM?

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

• Retail Clinic

• Primary care office and primary care physician

• Emergency Care Center

 •Emergency Department

 •hospital

• Outpatient Medical Center and many more.
Any medical institution can use CRM to manage patient information more effectively. Custom CRM software can also include specific features to meet the needs of a specific clinic or hospital.
What benefits can CRM bring?

CRM is a complex software system that takes some time to implement and more time to get used to. However, this inconvenience is trivial compared to the benefits that CRM brings to your patients and business.

1. Enhance the customer experience
Customers today are accustomed to adopting a personal approach to every aspect of their lives. The medical industry is no exception. Dealing with hundreds of patients every day, it's easy to forget to call or have a meeting, not to mention everyone's name and health. A customer relationship management system manages all of these tasks and improves the overall satisfaction of your patients with your services. That's it:
# 1 improve personalization
The CRM system stores not only the patient's personal health information, but also information about his birthday, age, gender, occupation, and more. With CRM, you can send personalized emails to congratulate patients on vacations, inform them of discounts on procedures or medical tests that can help them improve their condition, remind them about appointments, or call them to remind them to take medicine. These actions show patients the patients they care for, can help them recover faster, and make them more satisfied with your clinic.
# 2 reduce waiting time
More than 50% of doctors claimed that the biggest reason they missed the plan was that patients were late for appointments. The reminder function in CRM notifies patients about appointments in advance, reduces the number of patients who are late, and helps doctors follow their schedule more effectively.

In addition, customer relationship management solutions in the healthcare industry can promote closer communication between patients and medical staff, reduce silos, reduce waiting times, and provide necessary medical information in a timely manner.

# 3 provides post-discharge support

After they leave the clinic, they should stop caring for patients and communicate with them. Customized management systems can send discharge instructions and personalized care reminders over the phone or email over time, reducing recovery time and increasing patient satisfaction.

2. Eliminate management errors
Did you know that 70% of patients report multiple cases where they have to provide the same information to different doctors or medical institutions? In addition, 60% of the patients surveyed had to be re-examined because the initial results were lost.
Now, as the industry's focus shifts to the value of the services provided, the quality of life of patients becomes critical to clinic revenue. This increases the penalties that healthcare providers face for low customer satisfaction.
There is an urgent need to reduce errors and provide better service. Customer relationship management solutions in the CRM for healthcare industry address these issues. how about it? It automates most management processes and minimizes human interference (which is the main cause of errors). The CRM system will inform employees of all the information they need to enter and all the activities they need to complete.
3. Track referrals to resume interrupted care
The problem with transferring patients from primary care physicians to specialists is that it is difficult to track this process without modern procedures like CRM. About 30% to 50% of referring doctors cannot confirm whether their patients have visited a specialist. And, if they do get notified, most doctors rate the information they get from experts as fair or poor. As a result, many patients are simply lost in the system. Profits are also lost.
Healthcare CRM enables doctors to efficiently manage referral patients and store all relevant information in one place for quick access. If the patient is missing and the expert has no results, the system will notify the staff to check everything and resume the interrupted care as soon as possible.
4. Promote inbound and outbound communication

Poor communication between the clinic or doctor and the patient can lead to inadequate treatment and recurrence of the problem. Due to poor communication, patients have to repeat medical records to multiple providers, perform the same check again or perform unnecessary checks, which reduces the quality of care

The situation gets worse when it comes to the treatment of chronic conditions, and continuous communication is even more important. About 70% of all serious medical errors are due to poor communication during patient transfer. Hospital management software has many tools that facilitate communication between doctors and patients, doctors and doctors, clinics and patients, and clinics and partners.

External communication

The way you communicate with patients, other clinics and partners builds the image of the clinic or hospital. This is the main problem of outbound communication that modern clinics can solve with CRM:

Poor communication with other clinics and experts

Problem: Due to fierce competition, clinics and hospitals are reluctant to share data even if the clinics and hospitals refer patients to each other. Suvey said most hospitals waste about $ 12 billion a year due to poor communication. This hurts not only the clinic itself, but also the patient.

Solution: Of course, a CRM system cannot make you want to share information about patients with other healthcare providers. It's always up to you. However, once you decide to be more open with other providers to improve patient experience and patient satisfaction, CRM solutions will help you share data in a way that is compliant with HIPAA requirements. CRM can give other doctors or clinics access to the information you want to share, or let you automatically request information from a specialist who recommends your patients.

Poor communication with patients

Problem: Clinics and hospitals are still looking for a cheap but reliable way to communicate with patients. They use phones, emails, text messages and various chat methods. The biggest challenge here is to store the communication history in one place and quickly access this information.

Solution: CRM allows employees to add each conversation, email, phone and SMS message to a special board. If you use a custom solution, you can automate this feature to save time and effort. Another feature you can automate is reminders and alerts for appointments and other important patient events.

Centralized storage systems and automated email allow clinics to reduce errors and silos, and speed communication. Poor marketing campaigns

Question: To attract patients, the clinic needs to conduct marketing activities. However, when you send the same message to all patients, the feedback rate is low. The response rate of personalized email is 6 times that of non-personalized email. For example, emails tailored for patients with pre-diabetes not only increase their awareness of the problem, but also help them lead healthier lives by improving their condition and overall well-being.

Solution: The CRM system collects and processes data about patients, giving you valuable insights that can be used to create highly personalized messages. This will enable you to educate patients about their condition and inform them about events or medical trials that can improve their health or help them recover faster.

Inbound communication

Outdated communication channels within hospitals and clinics result in a potential annual revenue loss of $ 6 billion, accounting for more than 2% of US hospital revenues. This loss was mainly due to the following reasons:

Inefficient communication platform within hospitals and clinics

Problem: When employees have to wait long to respond, even the simplest communication between employees can become a big problem. The problem is so serious that more than 50% of hospitals and clinics now claim that their nurses are using personal mobile phones to support clinical communication. Because employees use insecure chats, SMS messages, and phone calls, such communications are difficult to track and can easily be hacked.

Solution: Messengers like WhatsApp are not HIPAA compliant, which means they cannot provide adequate protection for sensitive medical data. In addition, using them to share personal medical information is illegal in the United States. The chat function built into the healthcare CRM that meets HIPAA requirements is the ideal solution for clinics and hospitals. By using a single centralized system, clinics can reduce communication errors and secure communication within the organization.

5. Provide insights about patients for better marketing

In order to provide better quality of care, improve services, and build strong loyalty with patients, every medical institution must know who the client is, what they need and what their preferences are.

With CRM, you can track patient satisfaction, emotions, and the possibility of recommending their doctor or clinic to friends and family. You can collect this data using an automated survey in your CRM system. The findings can then be used to generate automated reports and provide valuable insights for supervisors and decision makers.

In addition, CRM systems can measure the return on investment of marketing activities. In this way, medical institutions can track the results and estimate the results of each marketing plan to attract more patients and raise awareness about a healthy lifestyle or a specific disease.

6. Ensure operational safety

Safety is one of the major concerns of the healthcare industry. On average, many patient records are leaked every day. Even today, many clinics, hospitals, and individual practitioners still store and transmit patient health information that is not compliant with HIPAA standards. For example, it is estimated that 70% of healthcare practices do not encrypt data on their mobile devices.

When building a custom CRM, you can build as many security mechanisms as possible to protect your clinic and patient's personal data from hackers. These security measures include:

• Multi-factor authentication

• Biometrics

• data encryption

• Electronic signature

• Multi-level user access to the database

• HIPAA compliant data storage

CRM systems allow clinics and hospitals to comply with federal and state laws and help avoid financial penalties for illegal data storage and improper handling of patient information.

Important points

Customer relationship management systems CRM in the healthcare industry are not only a trend, but they will soon disappear. Actual results from various clinics show that CRM software can help solve some of the biggest problems in the medical field, increase customer satisfaction and increase revenue.

CRM is no longer seen as just additional software to improve services. Today, they have become a necessary tool for survival in a highly competitive market. If you are ready to start changing clinics, please contact us now and see you tomorrow.

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