Patients are everything to healthcare businesses. Many hospitals and clinics worldwide still use excel sheets and offline records to maintain patient information. This often leads to the overworked administrative office making mistakes while entering data. Furthermore, tracking a patient’s journey, which ones you need to follow up with, which ones you are losing, etc., becomes a herculean task!

Investing in Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM for short, is an excellent solution to managing your patients and improving your healthcare business.

A healthcare CRM is a tool that supports medical service providers in storing and managing diverse patient data, enhancing patient acquisition strategy, service, and engagement, and automating sales and marketing activities while adhering to healthcare security standards. One way to ensure the CRM is safe for healthcare is to check whether they are HIPAA compliant.

With all that in mind, here are some ways CRMs can help your healthcare business 

1. Patient Retention

According to Forbes, the customer churn rate in hospitals is very high. Only about 60% of existing, established patients are noted to continue visiting a healthcare clinic for their next appointment.

Also, acquiring a new patient costs 5-25 times more than retaining an existing one.

This means that if you are able to retain even 75% of your patients, you will be able to save a ton of resources. CRMs help reduce patient churn by sending your patients timely reminders and follow-ups for appointments.

They also improve customer experience by gathering information and creating highly informative reports so that your administration knows what exactly it is a patient wants.

2. Reduce Patient Leakage

With so many patients flowing in and out of your healthcare facility daily, tracking them manually becomes an almost impossible task.

In fact, 90% of healthcare clinics are not highly confident in their visibility into patient leakage.

CRMs help ensure zero patient leakage. Since it is an automated process, patients are automatically moved from one stage of the funnel to another and duly updated in all other processes. A patient’s entire process can be closely monitored automatically using CRMs.

Another way CRMs ensure patients do not drop off while traversing through the sales pipeline is by sending tasks and reminders to the hospital counselors. This way, no one from your team will miss following up with a patient or forget important tasks due that day.

3. Automatic Lead/Inquiry Capture

A CRM can automatically capture and collect patient information through landing pages and other online websites. They can streamline information collected from different sources, like phone calls, walk-ins, online websites, social media, etc., into one area while ensuring that there is no information lost along the way.

CRMs often have a deduplication logic that ensures that a patient’s details aren’t repeated. Also, since it is all automated, there is no human error that comes along with the task. This ensures that no incorrect information or confusion happens while inputting information from patients.

4. Track Patient Sources

It is really important to know how your patients got to know about your healthcare service. Did someone refer them to you, or did they get your number from a google review? Knowing what channel brought them to you gives you a lot of clarity for your business.

You can understand which channels bring in the most customers and focus your marketing strategies and investments there. You can also get to know if a new strategy works or if previous ones are better. You can also find out what time of the day you usually get in more patients. This can help you make smarter investments and better marketing strategies.

5. Improve communication

Last but certainly not least, CRMs can help improve communication within the organization and between the healthcare facility and the patients.

CRMs for healthcare need to be HIPAA compliant so you do not have to worry about patient details being leaked to unauthorized people. This also eliminates human errors of accidentally leaking patient information.

Even during automated messages, CRMs will follow HIPAA-compliant texting, which also adds another layer of security. CRMs do all this while ensuring that emails are personalized, addressing each patient by name and what they are looking most forward to. This personalization and segmentation help in more effective communication with the patient.

CRMs also improve communication within your organization. Everyone is able to see which counselor is responsible for the patient and which stage of the funnel they are in, which improves ownership. They can also provide responsible doctors with complete medical histories, reducing the need to talk to other people and saving doctors time.

CRMs are an excellent investment and provide high ROI. They can immensely help hospitals automate their sales force and help free up some of their busy schedules. This can give your sales team more time to do the work they need to do rather than spending time doing boring, repetitive, and mundane tasks.