Everyone knows that if you don’t put gas in your car you won’t get very far. These days it might not be gasoline if you’re driving a Tesla, but the same principle applies. No matter your vehicle of choice, if you want to go far (and fast) you need an energy source.
In the healthcare CRM space, there’s no end of talk about the promise of what this technology can do. You’ve probably heard vendors describe the possibility of data analytics, sophisticated reports and dashboards, and the potential of business transformation from CRM implementations. My take is that the industry has focused far too much on the promise of the technology and not even close to enough on how to make it work in practice. It reminds me of the inscrutable three-phase money-making scheme of some animated garden gnomes in a popular cartoon:
The healthcare version of the gnomes’ puzzling business plan would be:
| Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Collect Underpants | ??? | Profit |
Why is implementing CRM not enough?
The answer lies in what makes healthcare CRM different from sales force automation systems like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. In sales force automation, the actionable data comes primarily from user activity within the system. As sales reps, customer service agents, and marketing teams use the CRM system it records that activity. Optimizing business processes primarily involves analyzing that captured data and guiding people throughout the business to work on the most profitable activities for clients and prospects.
Healthcare CRM systems should certainly perform this same type of data capture. As call center agents handle calls, care coordinators plan patient interactions, and marketing teams run campaigns, all of that activity should be tracked, analyzed, and reported on. However, to really be effective in healthcare the CRM must pull in data from many sources. A typical health system might have CRM-relevant data sources that look like this:
- Basic patient demographic data from multiple systems:
- EMR #1
- EMR #2
- Basic provider data:
- EMR #1
- EMR #2
- Offices and facilities:
- System #1
- System #2
- Care gaps from payers:
- Aetna
- Anthem
- BCBS
- United Healthcare
- Claims & referrals:
- Enterprise data warehouse
- Third-party claims data Vendor #1
- Third-party claims data Vendor #2
- Patient Discharges
- EMR #1
- EMR #2
- Third-party system, e.g. PatientPing
- Schedule Data
- EMR #1
- EMR #2
- Third-party system, e.g. PatientPing
In order to guide users to the next best action, an effective healthcare CRM needs to bring in data from all of these sources. On top of that, it not only has to do that one time during initial implementation, but it needs to continually ingest data so that the health system can make the best decisions based on up to date information. A healthcare CRM that isn’t constantly updated with data from these multiple source is like a car without fuel: you can push a lot of buttons, but you won’t be going anywhere.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
