CRM for Healthcare to Better Manage Patients

The first thing that crosses your mind when you are sick or hurt is that you want to get healthy as soon as possible. You don’t want to waste time filling long and tedious patient forms and keep waiting to receive the treatment. This situation seems to aggravate when we take a look at the statistics and find out that the hospitalization rate has increased by 122.69% in the last 20 years. Apart from bad government supervision, lack of strict norms, and lazy planning, the credit also goes to the indifferent attitude that hospitals often exhibit. As a result of these factors, healthcare consumers do not get a similar customer experience that they encounter while interacting with retail and consumer brands like Flipkart, Amazon, Reliance, etc. This calls for the healthcare industry to gear itself with state-of-the-art CRM technology that will allow them to capitalize on the power of data and provide personalized health care services to their patients.

This article will focus on how healthcare institutions can make use of CRM to better manage patients.

1. Get a 360-degree view of your patients

One of the many things that consumer and retail brands take note of is to store and retain personal information of their customers. This is something that the healthcare industry can learn from them. A CRM platform lets you do just that. It stores both general and critical information of your patients as you can see below.

General information – Critical information

Name – Critical Diseases

Age – Test records

Contact Number – Diagnoses

Email id – Ongoing treatments

Address – Documents and Reports

Emergency Number – Physician/Specialist detail

Medicines recommended –

This will keep everyone in the healthcare journey updated about the patients’ condition, right from the receptionist who records the patient’s data, to the doctor who provides the required treatment, and to the chemist who supplies the prescribed drugs. Also, since the CRM provides access to the patients’ critical medical history, it allows doctors to keep a 24/7 surveillance over their health and send precautionary measures at a moment’s notice.

Also read: Secure your Medical Device Manufacturing Business with ERP

2. Build an online payment billing system

Gone are the days when people used to pay through cash and checks. In the digital age that we live in, companies have moved over to online transactions. A CRM system allows patients to pay through easily-shareable links and QR codes. Another advantage is that it provides automated bills with a pointwise break-up so that it is easy for patients to receive reimbursements from insurance companies. Other factors that make CRM useful for the healthcare industry are as described below.

• Send a list of recommended tests and yearly checkups
• Share useful blogs, readworthy articles, and advice by experts
• Create bonanzas and offer customized healthcare packages at reduced rates to attract more people
• Offer services at a reduced price to your regular customers

3. Provide dedicated support to your patients

There was a time when people relied only on word-of-mouth to know the best doctor in the town. But today, according to a survey, 31% of the respondents depend on online reviews to select the right healthcare provider. To serve this new breed of patients who rely more on data, you need a system that helps you to proactively engage with them. A CRM platform is ideal for this due to the following reasons:

• Engage on multiple channels like voicemail, text emails, automated phone calls to update them about an upcoming appointment
• Share a personalized profile of the doctor with whom the patient has received the appointment
• Share downloadable lab results and reports
• Share tips on how to ensure hygiene in times of epidemics and pandemics such as coronavirus
• Send timely reminders

4. Make service your strong point

Experts across industries accept that it is less expensive to keep loyal customers than to get new ones. And the only way to do it is by providing excellent customer service. Here are some ways of how a CRM system can help a healthcare institution to provide better customer service:

• It keeps track of the patients’ social determinants of health such as physical environment, age, socioeconomic status, and education to anticipate their needs
• Updates about the patient’s health condition to secondary doctors and nurses in case the primary doctor are unavailable
• It provides a mobile portal where patents can directly ask questions and seek appointments from preferred doctors
• Streamlines operations to avoid data duplicity
• Provides a dedicated database of people with similar health conditions

In the past few years, the healthcare industry has experienced tremendous improvement in terms of the invention of high-end medical instruments and scientific breakthroughs. It is imperative that medical institutions now focus on strategies that can help them engage with patients on a one-to-one basis from the comfort of their home.

At Sage Software, we are home to industry-leading CRM software which helps you deliver individual attention that your patient wants. T