Healthcare organizations are investing in technology and capabilities to help their care teams connect with, care for and retain patients in the new outcomes-based landscape.
Value-based payment models have realigned incentives. Patient satisfaction, health outcomes and the ability to manage costs influence reimbursements under value-based models. Providers who receive poor scores from government payers will experience lower reimbursement rates as well as low quality and performance scores.
John Halamka, MD MS, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and Josh Newman, MD MSHS, CMO at Salesforce, discussed six ways customer relationship management (CRM) enables organizations to build trust across care journeys from acquisition, service, to engagement during a webinar on July 18, hosted by Becker's Hospital Review.
Here are the highlights on the three customer touch points: patient attraction, service and engagement.
Attraction — patient marketing and physician referrals
The primary intent of healthcare marketing is different under value-based care than fee-for-service care. Traditional healthcare models reward physicians for the volume of patients served; value-based models, on the other hand, hold health systems accountable for the community's overall health. In many cases, this means health systems benefit from keeping patients within their network of providers to more closely manage the costs and quality of care.
"By virtue of competition, or the importance of attracting patients to value-based organizations, the patient marketing piece and the physician referral piece is crucial," said Dr. Newman.
Marketing tools are evolving to support these new business needs. Rather than designing a marketing strategy to attract the most patients possible, marketing efforts today should be focused on demonstrating value to an already engaged patient, Dr. Halamka said.
"Our marketing folks [at Beth Israel] really need to keep the patients happy within the system of care ... by convincing them that our brand means something and that care coordination will happen better if they stay within that system," he said.
CRM can enhance the patient-provider interaction and demonstrate value by personalizing and simplifying patients' digital experiences. For example, CRM can encourage patients to download mobile apps connecting to an online health portal where they can access personal information and communicate with their providers.
"EHR is good for presenting clinical information," Dr. Newman said. "The Salesforce CRM platform is good for marketing to drive both patient behavior and the patient-provider relationship."
Service — contact center and home health
EHRs are not going anywhere anytime soon. But as care shifts from high-acuity care settings to low-acuity alternatives — primary care offices, rehabilitation centers, community organizations, patient homes — traditional EHRs' inability to seamlessly connect with other systems is problematic. Instead, providers need additional tools to actively manage the patient journey outside of the hospital's four walls.
"If you're goal is not generating a bill, or not complying with a regulation, but actually coordinating care across a group of people providing team-based services, then the EHR is insufficient," Dr. Halamka said.
Specifically, providers need a third-party product that can layer on top of an EHR and provide the functionality they're missing. CRM is an example of complementary software that can support the communication and data sharing tasks that are fundamental to succeeding in collaborative care. Within a single CRM, care teams can make referrals, coordinate appointments, conduct patient assessments in a home setting, understand social determinants, and connect with mobile applications.
"A whole ecosystem of caregivers, both medical and nonmedical, are important to the care of a patient, but also transportation, and rent assistance, and food assistance, and educational assistance," Dr. Newman said. CRM gives care teams the ability to bridge clinical and non-clinical organizations and information .
These capabilities extend into the contact center, which has traditionally fielded patient phone calls and provided customer service. "Even though contact centers have been around for a long time, they are obtaining new importance and expanding into clinical roles as people get care at home, or need care from remote places, and as people are using mobile devices," Dr. Newman said.
Engagement — care team collaboration and patient engagement
Reaching patients in their home is important for providing more convenient, cost-effective care. It is also important for reaching patients underserved by the traditional healthcare system due to geographic location, socioeconomic status or a physically prohibitive medical condition.
Healthcare technologies that promote efficient communication and collaboration among the entire care team, physicians, nurses, caregivers, families, and patients, are integral to coordinating and delivering great care that complies with the clinical pathway. Helping recovering patients remain engaged in and proactive with their postoperative plan both improves clinical outcomes and minimizes avoidable expenses during a 90-day episode.
CRM enables this level of collaboration in conjunction with the EHR and other clincial systems.
Conclusion
Technology is driving new avenues of communication to support the transformation from fee-for-service healthcare into collaborative medicine. Successful care management and engagement are contingent upon teamwork and shared decision-making across physicians, caregivers and patients; this rings especially true for high-risk, high-cost patients who achieve better outcomes when their social, mental and clinical needs are met. Third-party healthcare technologies, such as CRM, can streamline communication and support collaborative care to manage the care journey outside of a hospital's four walls.
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