As technology continues to fuel changes in consumers' healthcare expectations, a customer relationship management (CRM) system can help hospitals and health systems create a more tailored patient experience, which they have come to expect from other industry interactions.
During a Sept. 9 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Cerner and Salesforce, industry experts discussed how CRM technologies enrich patient interactions by pulling insights from their health data and communicating with them via their preferred modalities.
The speakers were:
- Peter Yates, senior director of HealtheCRM at Cerner
- Joshua Newman, MD, senior vice president of healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce
Five takeaways:
1. A clinically-informed CRM drives a connected healthcare experience for consumers. A clinically-informed profile must have the following three elements: be comprehensive, longitudinal and synthesized, according to Mr. Yates. Combining a patient's care journey information, from health history to payer eligibility and claims data into a single, longitudinal health record enables the health system to have a comprehensive view of the patient, keep track of their care needs, and anticipate trends and changes over time.
2. CRMs play a role in the connected healthcare experience. With a CRM system, healthcare organizations pull together their organizational structures, like marketing, contact centers and front-end and back-end revenue cycle offices. When communication is streamlined between these departments, it simplifies the patient experience.
"The connected healthcare experience is when all these operations feel harmonized to the patient," Mr. Yates said. "They feel like their health system knows them. The organization has their profile, so the patient doesn’t have to keep repeating the same information to every person with whom they engage."
3. CRM helps address care gaps due to social determinants of health. One of the big differentials in whether people receive basic clinical services "has much more to do with relationships, access and logistics than it does with the clinical work," Dr. Newman said. He stressed the importance of thinking about SDOH in terms of a "journey," to remove barriers.
"For so long in healthcare, we've focused on the clinical service we provided; making sure that the medication, vaccine, procedure or study is going to be done with great faithfulness and scientific rigor," he said. "Now it turns out as those therapies and procedures have propagated through healthcare, the battlegrounds are really around scheduling, identifying the need, helping people understand the need themselves of their own healthcare journey, and then making sure they get the service they need and they have the appropriate follow up afterward."
4. SDOH factors should be mapped out when building or implementing a CRM system. Cerner and Salesforce clients are starting to include SDOH aspects of patient journeys, like transportation or parking, into their CRM systems. By adopting this method, the health system can hit every possible touch point when engaging with a patient and get more patients to the door for the services they need.
5. Automated campaigns bridge care gaps. From the communication side, rolling out an automated messaging campaign to consumers using modern marketing and communication tools on top of the longitudinal EHR creates a more personalized experience. With these insights, the health system can send personalized messages using the patient's preferred communication channels and give them the information they need to reach their health goals.
Click here to view the full webinar.