Not many industries come even close to healthcare when it comes to high stakes, placing reputation on the table, juggling vast fields of data, dealing with numerous regulations and engaging with your customers at the worst time possible. Healthcare providers, as well as life sciences organizations, face the same problem – lack of efficient patient relationship management software.
A typical hospital has to store thousands upon thousands of client files, personal patient history, and it all has to be accurate, up-to-date and secure. Not to mention that every hospital needs to manage the logistics of pharmaceutical supplies, which are also heavily regulated.
Usually, hospitals end up with some overly complicated network of different software systems that are not integrated properly. As a result, healthcare professionals have to spend working hours filling out endless forms, copying documents and doing pretty much unnecessary paperwork. Obviously, there is a great demand in the market for healthcare-centered CRM software.
5 Key Elements of Healthcare CRM System
Security
Since healthcare providers need to comply with tons of government privacy and security policies, healthcare software should have some sort of safeguard that prevents unauthorized software installation and provides adequate encryption. No patient data should ever be stored in an unencrypted form at any time.
Security in healthcare and fraud associated with it is a big problem in the US, with over 200 security breaches in 2015 that led to over 100 million individual patients affected by it. And the risk of losing reputation forever, due to the leaked customer data, for companies is also great. Providers can also introduce access control so that only pre-approved health specialists would be able to retrieve particular patient information.
There are obviously best industry practices that you need to follow when running a healthcare IT infrastructure. However, the value of a secured cloud-based solution that is capable of patient relationship management can’t be overestimated.
Patient Engagement
The one commonly overlooked challenge that affects the entire industry is low patient engagement. In this line of business, there can’t be a quality improvement without patients satisfaction and their compliance with doctors. It is surprising, how often patients do not follow medication instructions and doctor recommendations. Many patients feel a disconnect between them and their physician. Healthcare providers nowadays start employing a more client-oriented workflow. It became a necessity to have tools capable of tracking each patient’s progress over the years, as well as tools that can help communicate better.
This is where a CRM can play a major part. With modern customer relationship management tools, it can be relatively easy to set up automatic reminders, push notifications as well as making patient profiles easily accessible to the doctor. These are just the features on the surface. With more advanced software, you can start tracking patients’ recovery progress in real time through wearables, and then through data visualization doctors will have analytics data at their disposal at all times.
And of course when we are talking about gathering real-time patient data, the matter of security becomes even more important, only now it adds a hardware aspect to the problem.
Patient acquisition and retention
Any healthcare CRM system worth its salt will be focusing on two things above anything else – attracting new patients and keeping patients. And this can only be achieved through building better patient-provider relationships. It is hard to find any other industry where customer relationships are as personal as here. There is a need for complete trust between both parties, as it is a building block for a healthcare provider brand.
In the past, it was simply assumed that if you provide adequate care, patients will come back. However, it is no longer the case. Today, the customer journey starts way before you enter the hospital doors. Companies need to start focusing on the non-clinical side of the healthcare sector, where customer service, patient experience as well as marketing play a major part.
CRM software can help companies with this by aggregating different media channels into a single interface, enabling your marketers to put a consistent brand messaging and tailor communication with clients at the right time of their journey.
This can easily strengthen your reputation and brand image as the healthcare provider, as it was shown that the way hospitals engage and communicate with their patients has a significant impact on the overall patient satisfaction rate.
Real-time data & collaboration
As we’ve said countless times before, reliable data is crucial for business growth, regardless of the industry domain. Having real-time data access can help you get a complete view of both members and patient base. Not only will a doctor be able to easily access patient data and better understand an individual’s profile, which will include clinical and nonclinical data, but also this data can be used to gain an insight into demographics and communications. Not to mention that the system needs to pull data from aggregated sources such as wearables, other possible facilities, multiple databases and so on.
It’s always nice to have accurate information at the right time, as it empowers patients and members to access and track progress towards their health goals and care plans. Check out our data analysis services to learn more.
Salesforce Health Cloud – Patient Relationship Management Platform
Obviously, there is a great demand on the market for a healthcare-centered CRM software. And where there is a demand, there must be a supply. It is no surprise that Salesforce, CRM giant, has already developed patient relationship management software.
Salesforce Health Cloud is a health IT CRM platform that provides healthcare organizations with a tool to streamline doctor-patient relationships and manage records. Just like in a more typical CRM, Health Cloud lets you create a patient profile by integrating information from multiple data sources, including electronic medical records (EMRs), medical devices and wearables. Additionally, on the client side, Health Cloud provides patients with a portal environment that lets them view their current health conditions, prescribed medications, and scheduled appointments, and preferred communication methods to always be able to reach out to their physician. Health Cloud automatically updates the patient profile as new data comes in.
Since healthcare is an extremely challenging industry, to begin with, Salesforce realized that its first attempts resulted in an overly complex system. So after a couple of updates and re-releases, Salesforce CRM for healthcare is easy-to-use and helps physicians access appointment scheduling and patient management with ease.
Naturally, the company wanted to address the most common challenges and deliver a solution that can help healthcare providers remain competitive in the market and improve patient satisfaction. During the development of Health Cloud, Salesforce focused on the following benefits:
- complete 360 view of members and patients;
- insightful analytics, and personalization features;
- easy-to-use enhanced EHR system;
- big data gathering and predictive analytics;
- ability to deliver a stellar patient experience.
Salesforce Health Cloud Implementation Guide: 6 Important Things to Consider
Just like with any other CRM platform, there are lots of different objects and cases that you’ll need to set up an entire dynamic infrastructure for your healthcare business. Here is a list of the most crucial aspects that you’ll need to consider is data integration.
- Your IT team that will be running Salesforce CRM for healthcare needs to understand compliance and regulations policies, otherwise you risk violating patients’ privacy. Which can lead to numerous lawsuits against your company.
- You need to have an effective data governance program in place. Meaning that there needs to be a standardized terminology and data classification system, established data flow, and clear standards for data accuracy and precision.
- You also need to focus on software adoption and make sure that your team understands the features of Salesforce Health Cloud.
- Define your organization’s objectives and expected outcomes and incorporate those in your KPIs.
- Enhance your security further by utilizing best practices during the development lifecycle.
- Integrate existing IT assets with Salesforce Health Cloud software point by point:
- Define business and technical requirements;
- Create a detailed roadmap;
- Complete a full QA process.
After you’ll have these six steps nailed, you can go about setting up the platform, pretty much as the instruction manual tells you.
Naturally, Salesforce Health Cloud has a data model that is built to connect to health data sets with ease. Such design is due to the common demand of healthcare providers to perform the business logic integration. Companies in this industry are looking for the software that can build integrations, host HIPAA-controlled data, while at the same time satisfy the security regulations.
Salesforce Health Cloud Implementation Services by OMI
With Health Cloud, Salesforce aims at delivering CRM solutions for the healthcare sector focusing on patient data real-time access and updates, communication tools, and real-time patient engagement functionality. And with a strong emphasis on the physician-patient relationship, the company has a great shot at developing a staple of the industry standards.
If you are ready to take the first step towards implementing Salesforce Health Cloud and integrating it with your existing IT infrastructure, then look no further than OMI (Outsource Management Inc.). Our team focuses on developing and integrating advanced Salesforce solutions that work in line with your business model and answer your requirements. Also, we ensure that the resulting system is fully compliant with government regulations and follows the best industry security practices.