Concepts of Medical CRM

"Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company's interactions with clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronize business processes — principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.

Once simply a label for a category of software tools, today, it generally denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs."

What is CRM

What is Medical CRM ?

Medical CRM provides a healthcare organization with a one-to-one communication solution that improves care delivery, lowers costs, and increases loyalty among the key stakeholders most necessary to organizational success.

Increase patient service levels

Improve efficiency of call centers

Service more effectively

Help health care staff to work quickly

Simplify medical processes

Increase ROI

CRM can….

80% of organizations report success with CRM programs

Examples Union Pacific Railroad (Siebel)

4500 users / Replaced legacy system / Strategic part of overall business intelligence strategy

Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago (PeopleSoft) 5800 employees / Replaced legacy system / “Automation means

clinicians can focus more time on patient care. Having PeopleSoft as a support system will help us achieve our mission of patients first.”

CRM Success Stories

CRM and Electronic Medical Records (EMR)

“Initiative designed to help an organization (physician / hospital) optimize interactions with customers (patients) for the purpose of acquiring or retaining customers (patients).”

“ BY COMPUTERIZING HEALTH RECORDS, WE CAN AVOID DANGEROUS MEDICAL MISTAKES, REDUCE COSTS AND IMPROVE CARE”

“Transition from paper medical records (PMR) to EMR requires strong physician leadership and institution’s committeemen of human and capital resources.”

Capturing data from across the enterprise and consolidating it into a database (also known as a Master Customer Information File)

Analyzing the database to determine the best marketing opportunities, the best targets for those opportunities, and the best ways to communicate with those targets. This can include marketing to:

Patients Non-patient consumers Referring physicians (owned and non-

owned) Non-referring physicians

Identifying the return on investment from those campaigns

For healthcare providers, the three key elements of CRM are:

Benefits of CRMImproves the bottom line

One healthcare provider has been doing CRM for more than three years, and has made close to $16.9 million on a total investment of $5 million.

A CRM program allows to target efforts on most profitable customers (consumers or physicians) and people who "look like" most profitable customers.  For example, if you are doing a promotion for prostate screenings, CRM will allow you to target men who not only are most likely to need these services, but will also be more profitable customers for you.  

CRM also can improve your bottom line by lowering marketing expense. Since you know the best people to market to, what to market to them, and which communications channels to employ, you don't have to spend money marketing to others.

CRM allows you to track the return on investment of your programs. By using control groups (people you don't market to, but "look like" the people you do market to), you can measure the impact of the marketing campaign, and counter the objection that "they would have come anyway."

As another hospital marketer said: "CRM has given us new insight and changes the way we utilize marketing dollars. We can track our return on investment, which has given us a greater deal of respect with the CEO and CFO."

Benefits of CRMIt is quantifiable

Your CRM program will enable you to send the right message to the right people at the right time, thereby allowing them to take better care of their health. Programs such as these also can boost customer loyalty. This is true for consumers and physicians.

Benefits of CRMEnhances relationships with consumers and physicians

For consumers, for example, you can send women turning 40 a reminder to get a mammography. At the same time, you can offer an incentive, such as a discount coupon to a spa.

For physicians, you can offer special tours of new facilities, but only invite physicians who meet certain referral criteria.

This may seem counterintuitive, since you may be reducing the number of people to whom you are marketing. But think about it:

Through targeting, you are sending your messages to the people who most need the services

Improving the bottom line will free up resources for charity care and other initiatives to help you better serve your entire community.

Benefits of CRMImproving the health of community

So how do you go about setting up a successful CRM program? Here are the key steps.  

1. Executive endorsement. CRM touches every facet of the organization, not just marketing. IT support is essential. Finance needs to help analyze data to identify opportunities. And the medical staff needs to understand how they will be affected. None of this is possible without a strong endorsement from the highest levels of the organization.

2. Involve the enterprise. After the C-suite endorses the initiative, implementing the CRM program should clearly be driven by marketing. But since the CRM program really touches every aspect of the organization, the team that actually selects the CRM vendor should include the following:

Marketing (to spearhead the process)IT (to deal with the data)Finance (to ensure all assumptions on ROI, etc. are correct)Physician relations (especially if marketing to physicians is a key strategy)

Setting up a successful CRM program

3. Interview CRM vendors. Look at CRM providers that understand healthcare, as opposed to "generalists."  should offer:

A database specifically designed for healthcare Built in segmentation or modeling that can quickly target the right people for

specific Reports that can easily answer all your questions, from targeting to tracking ROI Staff that are healthcare CRM experts

4. Make your decision. Initial presentations at your location, focusing on how their solutions can meet your needs.Compile all features and put together a matrix of all features, including pricing, so you can easily make comparisons.  After all, since CRM is marketing based on analysis, the decision on which vendor to use should be based on thorough analysis.

Concluded another hospital marketer: "CRM is one of those things that once you have it and see what its capabilities are, it is impossible to go back to marketing without it.  Without it, you are almost marketing with blinders on."

Setting up a successful CRM program