Electronic communication and digital documentation has streamlined practice management processes for today’s healthcare professionals. You send electronic prescriptions to your patient’s pharmacy, and receive electronic images of their last ultrasound. You find that this is efficient and has improved your effectiveness as a healthcare provider.
But your staff is still hand writing appointment cards and dialing the phone to remind patients of upcoming appointments. Improve your patient relationships by automating the provider-patient communication process using a healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) system. Depending on the size of your practice, there are four effective ways to implement a healthcare CRM.
1. Outsource CRM Functions to a Contact Center
Call centers or contact centers can handle all of your patient communications including appointment setting and billing inquiries. They can receive your provider referrals, perform patient intake, obtain insurance authorizations, and schedule procedures.
Most contact centers use proprietary systems that allow you to view appointment calendars and patient logs in downloadable report formats, or some may integrate with your existing systems. Quality control is more challenging when using contact centers. Employees work for the contact center, not for your practice. They may not be fully invested your goals nor fully committed to your practice’s growth.
2. Hire a Software Developer
Medium-sized practices that do not have in-house IT personnel can have a software expert design a customized healthcare CRM. Custom-designed software allows you to incorporate every aspect of your practice to exacting standards. However, support and upgrades are more complex, costly, and time consuming.
3. Purchase Generic CRM Software
Smaller healthcare practices can easily adapt some of the most popular CRM programs for their most critical needs. Managing patient newsletter mailing lists and even sending email appointment reminders is easy with many of the CRM products on the market. Some CRMs offer industry-specific modules, while others use a basic system designed to keep costs low. You may find that some functions do not adapt well and do not fully integrate with your EHR or EMR systems.
4. Invest in a Cloud-based Patient Relationship Management (PRM) System
Providers and practices of all size can benefit from implementing a cloud-based, fully hosted, and industry-specific CRM. Companies like Solutionreach specialize in CRM for medical, dental, and vision practices. Using a web-hosted system, they provide multiple solutions that can be fully integrated with most EMR, EHR, and practice management systems.
Healthcare specific CRM, known as PRM, allows you to customize and adapt the software to meet your practice goals. Various modules are designed to enhance your provider-to-patient email communications and automate reminder and information calls while remaining compliant to HIPAA laws.
