Driving CRM value in healthcare: deploying intuitive CRM options can produce greater ROI and enhanced patient and caregiver experience

Health Management Technology, Sept, 2007 by Rebecca Wettemann

For those that know customer relationship management (CRM)--but not necessarily healthcare--CRM seems like the perfect solution to many of the healthcare industry's key problems. Need to improve efficiency and manage patient records? Track patients' progress electronically. Need to improve patient care? Use metrics and analytics to evaluate those records and identify areas for improvement. Need to maximize quality of care while minimizing cost? Adopt CRM to track and manage patient satisfaction.

Unfortunately, the challenges many other CRM adopters have struggled with in the past that thwarted success and slowed the delivery of CRM value are arguably even more present in healthcare:

User adoption: If you think salespeople are difficult to train and motivate to use new software, try doctors.

Multiple data sets in multiple systems: Particularly with merger and acquisition activity in healthcare organizations, and departmentalized data warehousing efforts, few healthcare organizations have a single integrated view of all their data.

Customer data confidentiality concerns: Many other sectors view this as a customer confidence issue, but in healthcare, customer data security and confidentiality is not only important, it's critical--and regulated.

IT budget challenges: As healthcare organizations have looked to cut costs and improve efficiencies, investing in broad IT initiatives has not been a common practice.

Many CRM vendors have targeted healthcare as a key opportunity area. However, given these challenges, it's not surprising that most CRM vendors have won more customers in pharmaceuticals, health testing, and other related fields than at hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Despite this, healthcare organizations that have explored investments in improving customer relationship management have delivered ROI while visibly improving patient care, both by learning from others' mistakes in key CRM success areas and by looking beyond the old-school definition of CRM technology. What follows are a number of key strategies for success.

Look Beyond the CRM Label

Many CRM vendors provide customized solutions for the healthcare vertical market and many implementation partners provide vertical-specific on expertise in making CRM applications work in healthcare. Despite this, it's important to remember that a number of technologies and not just those with the CRM moniker can deliver value as part of a broader strategy to support CRM in healthcare. We've analyzed a number of cases where content management from various vendors enabled companies to improve patient management and patient care by providing better access to information for both staff and patients.

Another key technology area supporting CRM improvements in healthcare is data analysis. Business intelligence or predictive analytics tools that fall more on data analysis than "pure" CRM may present better short-term ROI opportunities than a broad investment in case management. For example, some CRM tools are designed to provide all employees with dashboards and reporting to monitor patient care metrics while others provide predictive analytics, used to predict outcomes for better proactive management.

Think Before You Move Data

No matter whether it is CRM, content management or analytics, taking a close look at all three can help you leverage data to improve patient management. But it's also a good idea to look before you leap. We've found most healthcare organizations have, at best, fragmented data stores, multiple record-keeping systems and inconsistent data entry processes. Before you start paving over cow paths, you should take a closer look at what you have.

As an example, a medical testing company that we evaluated recently had deployed a CRM solution. During the deployment, the testing company had imported information from its legacy billing system directly into the application. It found that incomplete data and lack of a clear understanding of the data structure required additional changes to make the deployment successful.

Don't Ignore On-demand Options

On-demand CRM has been a disruptive and positive force in the market. It is no longer just a strategy for the midmarket or departmental CRM need, nor is it out of the hands of IT. By building a developer community and an on-demand development language, on-demand can support more complex requirements than it could just months ago. It can also be an opportunity for internal developers to build customized CRM solutions and then outsource the ongoing support. Continued innovation and growth of new marketing, sales and service applications in the on-demand marketplace will force the on-premise players to continue to innovate as well.

Some have been concerned about security and integrity of data when deploying on-demand CRM for healthcare. However, reviewing the data security measures that on-demand vendors employ to ensure the security of individual customers' data may reveal that it's more robust than your internal measures. We should all be watching to see if Google's recent acquisition of Postini, a messaging security service, drives its expertise in security and compliance even further. Adopting on-demand can also help you to accelerate CRM deployment. If you wish, you can then migrate some applications or user accounts back on premise to reduce the burden on IT and capital risk while delivering significant benefit.