Healthcare Patient CRM Software: Features, Benefits And Cost

Whichever the industry, people need to accumulate data for further analysis or other usages.

The Healthcare industry also stays under the same roof. To provide the apt and required treatment, healthcare providers should have access to comprehensive patient history and other related patient data. 

Turning our face back, we will get to know that the first launch for optimizing the record-keeping process was Electronic health record systems (EHRs). Despite depending on paper files, it helps index, analyze, and retrieve digital records with just a few keystrokes. 

EHRs entirely transformed the healthcare industry and crafted a pathway for other advancements in patient management software. 

This post will guide you on how to build patient CRM software with Salesforce, who uses it, why to use it, top features, benefits, and much more.

What Is Patient CRM Software?

The success of a healthcare organization relies on the patients’ experiences and outcomes. To meet this requirement, healthcare management software exists, namely Patient Relationship Management (PRM), which assists in improving engagement, access, and communication between healthcare providers and patients, leading to better experiences. 

Also known as healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) software, PRM software enables the practices to offer patients the details they want to stay engaged and well-informed on their healthcare edge. This personalized experience makes the patients come back repeatedly. 

Patient Relationship Management software facilitates key communications delivered to the patients at the right time through the right channel.

Who Uses Patient Relationship Management (PRM) Software?

Patient management software is crafted to accumulate related data from medical devices. 

Elaborating on it, patient management software is any digital system developed to help in collecting, organizing, and analyzing patient data. 

Various patient management apps permit users to implement solutions for certain medical fields, like dental clinical care, mental health, and more. 

Many medical practitioners use such patient communication services: 

• Healthcare providers
• Medical office staff
• Patients

Why Do You Need Patient Management?

A patient management system holds the caliber to ensure that one can effectively schedule their appointments ahead. Also, such healthcare software can track and record patients’ information from varied sources, which lets you follow up with patients and makes appointment booking simple for patients. 

Healthcare CRM can integrate appointment history, patient diagnoses, information, prescriptions, billing records, etc. Also, it assists hospitals and practices lower costs by automating tasks, such as sending reminders, appointment scheduling, and billing. 

Features of Patient Relationship Management Software

1. Scale More Effectively

Evidently, growth is always exciting, though one of the biggest challenges for any organization. 

With a PRM system, one can ensure that the processes stay the same even during speedy expansion. 

2. Closely Track Patient Journeys 

This healthcare software saves the patient’s data for healthcare providers to facilitate them to keep a check on data as and when required. Even doctors easily search patients’ data by their names or other filtering options. 

3. Make Patients Satisfied with Better Healthcare Services

Some healthcare services are challenging and complex for patients to use.

Here arrives a simple PRM system that helps offer patients an easy-to-use process that makes them control their health. 

4. Email Marketing

A fantastic way to stay foremost in your patients’ thoughts is by sending regular emails. Whether you choose a newsletter or targeted campaigns, your PRM software needs to offer customizable templates to showcase your brand and send related messages easily. 

You can adopt a PRM solution that provides email audience segmentation, a comprehensive history of campaigns, and perfect performance monitoring. 

5. Text Messaging

Nowadays, texting has become a widely used mode of communication for various customers. 

In fact, a report says that a few years back, US consumers exchanged two trillion and more text messages recently. 

So, a PRM solution with a well-integrated texting feature assists providers with the patients wherever they are. 

It may also include bulk-texting features that allow sending essential messages to patients with two-way texting, review requests, and appointment reminders. 

6. Appointment Reminders

Per recent studies, missed appointments cost $150$ billion annually to the US healthcare industry. 

Using missed appointments, you can avoid missed appointments as it arrives with customized appointment reminders to reach patients through email, text, and voice. 

The top-quality PRM software allows you to schedule patient reminders at a time that works for your patients and practice while seamlessly integrating with your scheduling solution. 

7. Recall Messaging

Various medical practices are usually concerned about inactive patients. Sending a reminder to dormant patients is a good strategy to re-engage. 

Automated recall reminders sent through text, email, and voice are essential to reconnect disengaged patients easily. 

A PRM solution must support automated call messaging to inform patients about their scheduled annual check-ups or appointments. 

8. Online Booking

Nowadays, scheduling appointments online have become feasible for almost everything. 

Medical practices can also enter this world by picking a Patient Relationship Management solution that provides the facility to book appointments online. 

You just need to add a calendar widget to your website that syncs with the scheduling system and start receiving email alerts for every new appointment. 

Moreover, patient management software allows one to view all the appointments from the main dashboard and accept, reschedule, or flag them easily. 

9. Mobile Appointment Check-In

Lately, face-to-face contact between doctors and patients has become limited during the pandemic days, which was imperative. 

Here, an advanced PRM solution permits a contactless mobile check-in process, including screening forms, appointment reminders, and text alerts to inform the patients that providers are all set to see them. 

Later, even after the pandemic, we can keep that process in place for easy check-ins and minimize the front-desk team load. 

10. Patient Portal

However, the healthcare industry was already moving into the digital world, but the COVID-19 outburst accelerated that and pushed various people to connect with medical practitioners through online mode. 

A patient portal can help in meeting the requirements of emerging and digital-savvy patients. 

A healthcare PRM with a patient portal, including an appointment dashboard, scheduling option, secure messaging, and online patient form, would be a great help. Patients can use this portal to stay connected with their appointments. 

11. Patient Education

Patient education is a must when you need to build a bond with patients and improve their health outcomes. 

Patient communication services can assist in creating patient-centered content that you can use on your site, in your Patient Portal, and email outreach. 

This is how you can guide your patients to pick a healthy lifestyle or offer them insights on health conditions while staying connected with them throughout their healthcare journey. 

12. Reputation Management

Word of mouth is still holding its place as various consumers check online reviews to get information about providers. 

A study shows that around 91% of consumers agree that online reviews are the decision makers for conducting business. 

With a PRM solution including reputation management, one can send automated review requests, get alerts about new reviews, and push them to the review websites you want. 

13. Satisfaction Surveys

With satisfaction surveys, you can accumulate insights and act on feedback if you need to deliver outstanding customer service. 

Your PRM solution should ease process automation by sending a patient survey post every appointment. You can also use or customize industry-standard questions to stay updated about customer sentiment. 

14. Salesforce EHR Integration

When integrated with EHR and CRM, patient-centered care becomes more attainable. You can save time confirming information from different care-providing sources and spend more on knowing your patients and their needs. 

Benefits of Patient CRM Software

1. Enhances Growth

PRM software programs help improve healthcare organizations’ growth by increasing patient engagement rates and staying connected with them. Besides, it facilitates holding your current patients and getting new ones. 

2. Keeps Patients From Falling Through the Cracks

Patient relationship management software can prevent patients from being unnoticed as it automates scheduling notifications and appointment reminders so that you never have to fret about forgetting to connect any patient for appointments.

3. Increases Patient Satisfaction

Using Patient CRM software, you can make your patients happier. You can craft new ways to schedule appointments and connect the providers despite just making a call and waiting for someone to revert. 

By keeping your patients satisfied, you can boost retention rates. 

4. Enhance Patient Engagement

Healthcare treatments offer patients access to their entire medical journey. The credit goes to healthcare CRM which makes data more accessible to the patients and care providers. 

Doctors and patients stay connected through secure messaging services. Both parties can check the chart progress, evaluate and even set their health goals, and contact the specialists when needed. 

Reports say, around 72% of physicians access the drug details using their smartphones, about 44% connect with nurses and other medical staff via smartphones, and 63% go through the medical research from tablets. 

The patient management system is compatible with mobiles and thus keeps patients, doctors, and data well-connected. 

5. Improve Patient Management

Healthcare providers need to stay updated on all the patients’ health. 

A healthcare CRM can help by generating an interface with precise data visualization to allow medical specialists to view all the patients and tasks. This way, you can set the priority of actions per time sensitivity and importance. 

Besides, users can divide populations into groups for clearer communication and allow the care team to participate easily, enabling more effective patient transfer between professionals. 

Apart from that, this system automates the processes and alerts the staff if tasks are not attained. 

6. Better Reputation Management

With a patient management system, the medical staff and patients will not face any issues relevant to clerical work, leading to an improved healthcare organization’s reputation. Besides, the users can check patient ratings and reviews, accumulating feedback that can improve medical practice. 

7. Improves Operational Efficiency 

As Patient CRM software automates varied tasks that you can perform manually, you will catch up with a more efficient way to accomplish things. Also, you can diminish the patients’ waiting time by making them busy filling out the form before connecting with doctors. It will ease the healthcare organization to see their patients on time, enhancing their engagement rates. 

8. Patient Communication Services 

A patient relationship management system improves engagement, communication, and access, leading to better patient and healthcare organizations’ experiences. There’s no need to check the spreadsheets or other paperbacks for patient details. 

9. Reduces No-Shows

Using PRM software, you can send automatic reminders to your patients about their appointments. Resultantly, you will not allow your patients to forget their upcoming appointments, reducing your no-show rate. 

Besides, you can ease your patients in scheduling and even rescheduling their appointments through online mode. 

10. Patient Experience Management 

Using Patient CRM, you can get insights that will help you enhance patient engagement. Also, you can ensure that you care by offering helpful information to your patients about their illnesses and injury and using it to get the most out of the follow-up appointments. 

11. Improve Record-Keeping

You are increasing patient engagement by offering patient health journey access through record-keeping. When integrated with current electronic health records (EHRs), a patient management system lets the patients and healthcare providers fast and directly access patients’ data. 

12. Accumulate Real-Time Patient Data

Patient CRM software helps accumulate essential data from medical devices through IoT connectivity to speedily and perfectly analyze updated patient data. 

13. Resolve Interoperability Issues

Various healthcare organizations are reaping the benefits of such software. They interact with other medical systems to get patient records, send them to other medical specialists electronically and securely, receive new patients’ data, and integrate that into patients’ EHR. It helps in smooth communication through compatibility and standardization with EHRs. 

14. Make Smarter Decisions

Technological advancements help to transform patient relationships. Similarly, AI provides predictive powers that aid providers know patient requirements and provide personalized care. 

In healthcare, healthcare consumers accept AI as a captivating prospect; in fact, approximately 84% believe it will be best at offering health-relevant reminders, like health goals and other healthcare plan tasks. 

15. 360-Degree View Of Patient

Off course, CRMs provide a complete view of the patient’s comprehensive health status that the users can easily access and act upon. 

A healthcare CRM stays in sync with data from a broad range of sources, incorporating medical devices and EHRs to craft a full view of the patient’s health. Healthcare providers can access medication details, research existing conditions, and check patients’ appointment histories. 

Furthermore, users can recognize a patient’s contact choices to engage the patients across their preferred channels. 

Per Salesforce research, most healthcare consumers are aligned towards the latest channels that offer instant reverts, such as live chat/messaging, MS/text, and video chat. In fact, Gen Z and Millennial consumers are more likely to value these channels than older generations. 

16. Engage Across Platforms, Devices, Networks, & Stakeholders.

Worldwide, patient data is worth it if it’s available to people on time when needed. Otherwise, it’s of no use. 

Thus, the healthcare CRM is crafted to ease and secure collaboration. Medical specialists coordinate efforts, assign jobs, and directly message each other. 

Simultaneously, care plans need patients in their treatment journey. 

A healthcare CRM system is crafted to include patients, assign goals, chart progress, and find healthcare providers for addressing care-relevant queries. This has improved deeper engagement and permitted patients to build a sense of accountability and ownership for their self-care. 

Case Studies by Salesforce

1. Stanley Healthcare’s Success Story

Salesforce assists Stanley Healthcare in connecting with Stanley’s customers to offer a better patient experience in a secure and safe environment. 

Stanley is a market-leading visibility solution and analytics provider in the healthcare industry. Stanley contributes to top-quality resident and patient care at around 5,000 healthcare systems, hospitals, and 12,000+ senior living communities. 

Stanley partnered with Salesforce to meet healthcare providers’ requirements to improve patient care quality while diminishing operational costs. 

Stanley Healthcare’s sales and service teams can now resolve customer issues with healthcare providers’ 360-degree views and a stack of self-care options. 

With time, their customer satisfaction rose and reached above the benchmark levels, first-call resolution increased by 20%, and agent productivity augmented about sixfold. 

“Customer care is really our culture, and it’s what we strive to do. We use Salesforce to deliver that, to really embed ourselves inside the lives of our customers, so we see things as they do.”

MARTY GUAY, PRESIDENT, STANLEY HEALTHCARE

2. Mount Sinai Health System’s Story

The world’s #1 CRM company, Salesforce, an Intelligent Customer Success Platform, declared that an integrated health system, Mount Sinai Health System, which is committed to offering exceptional care, performing transformative research, and advancing biomedical education, is utilizing Salesforce to organize and handle Medicaid recipients’ care in its Performing Provider System (PPS).

The Healthcare System sought an effective way to link with all the organizations and providers across its wide ecosystem with comprehensive patient views. Getting these details when needed, healthcare providers can better know patients’ requirements and give them more personalized and proactive care.

Salesforce helped Mount Sinai to beat the challenge and streamline how communities are served.

Using Health Cloud and Community Cloud, the healthcare systems are crafting a real-time, mobile care coordination program that can help every member of the Mount Sinai PPS to get assistance at all stages of the care journey.    

What’s The Average Cost Of a CRM In 2022?

You can connect the best care experience with the #1 patient relationship management platform at the best price. 

Enterprise Plan: $300/user/month (billed yearly) 

Unlimited Plan: $450 /user/month (billed annually)

Challenges with Patient Relationship Management (PRM) Software

1. Security

Healthcare firms should follow a proactive approach to security, as cybersecurity threats usually occur. Here, people may prove to be an apt asset for preventing cybercrime. Leaders must train every employee on the security terms as data breaches may give birth to severe issues for the organization’s reputation and lead to fines because of HIPAA compliance failure.

2. Integrations

Patient CRM solutions usually have integrations with various other external apps. It saves administrators time on manual data transmission back and forth via third-party apps. Vendors can charge for extra interactions also. 

3. Training and Onboarding

Practical training and onboarding will help accelerate the adoption of PRM software. Additionally, administrators and practitioners quickly start finding software easy to use and feel energetic using and communicating. 

Regular training also diminishes the wrong usage, miscommunication, or insufficient documentation. Staff will benefit from professional development training courses, compliance maintenance, and competence development. 

4. Data Migration

It would be tough to carry data from one product to another because of the unique hosted platform of the vendor. Users may find data migration quite challenging. Data migration queries need to be mentioned in vendor demos and discussions. 

5. Disparate Systems

Various vital processes like insurance verification, care coordination, call scripting/guidance, nurse triage, scheduling, provider network management, and more split across individual systems, affecting coordinator and agent productivity. 

6. Inefficient Workflows And Siloed Knowledge 

During and post engagement workflow, the failure to drive and streamline standardization and longer follow-up times end up restricting agent productivity. 

The inability to view other service lines, facilities, provider attributes, or program FAQs hamper the caliber of offering the first-call resolution. 

7. Capped Agent And Coordinator Enablement

It’s the failure to catch up with best practices, customer preferences, and knowledge/guidance to enhance patient efficiency and onboarding and the inability to reap the advantage of patient interactions to improve service education and increase engagement and results. 

How Can We Help You Build A Healthcare CRM With Salesforce?

We at Emizentech hold teams of certified Salesforce developers who will help you in every possible way to let you reap the benefits of a healthcare CRM using Salesforce. 

We offer the providers a proven and cost-effective approach to boost patient engagement while maintaining top-class care delivery that is apt for the existing healthcare environment. 

We will help you build your healthcare CRM including your customized business needs, or we can integrate a new one into your existing system to let you take advantage of a Patient Relationship Management System. 

Conclusion

CRM holds the caliber to boost conversion to about 300%. So, you can imagine how important a CRM is in a healthcare organization.

Developing a healthcare CRM from scratch demands extensive knowledge. You need to connect with experienced and proficient Salesforce consultants who can guide you towards the best and apt pathway towards success.