Custom Healthcare CRM Development: Key Features and Cost

On this blog, we had briefly mentioned customer relationship management (CRM) software in the context of enterprises and travel and tourism. Now we’d like to elaborate on the role of CRM in healthcare.

 

Patients expect easy access to the healthcare system, highly personalized services, and privacy and security for their health information.

 

They are more informed, involved in their own healthcare, and meticulous in selecting providers. The marketing departments of healthcare institutions need to adapt to these challenges.

 

At the same time, technology is revolutionizing how healthcare functions. As the number of touchpoints and data inputs increases, health systems need to collect, store, and analyze that flood of data more effectively.

 

For improving patient outcomes, health care teams need a “single pane” view of each patient and tools for organizing the appropriate care and communications. Simultaneously with delivering truly patient-centered care, the healthcare industry strives to contain the operational costs. 

 

A comprehensive health analytics and customer relationship management system provides a solution to the needs of patients and healthcare providers alike.

 

The Definition of Healthcare CRM Software

Generally, CRM software keeps the customers’ and business data in order. Customer Relationship Management in the healthcare industry helps engage, acquire, and retain patients and improve care across the patient lifecycle.

 

Besides hospitals, this software can be used by companies that deal with pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, or health insurance.

 

A healthcare CRM system, also called HCRM or medical CRM, integrates a consumer’s social, behavioral, clinical, and financial details into a holistic profile.

 

For this purpose, it weaves together electronic health records (EHRs), patients’ interactions with the organization’s web page and call center, provider credentialing, and even indirect sources like web traffic and subscription opt-ins. 

 

An HCRM can be built and customized to be integrated with existing EHRs, EMRs (electronic medical records), appointment calendars, radiology information systems, and other databases and care-delivery tools, as well as a Quality Management System (QMS).

 

API integrations with a content management system (CMS) and marketing automation platform (MAP) facilitate the creation of personalized customer experiences in a scalable way.

 

The software should also integrate easily with medical billing, accounting, human resources management (HRM), and other back-office systems. All of this reduces duplicate record keeping.

 

HCRM products include a unique mix of features, often more than one hundred, but primarily, they address the following areas.

 

The Benefits of Building Custom Healthcare CRM

 

Patients

Healthcare CRM software helps ensure that patients have access to the correct information and services in timely manner.

 

For example, a patient can schedule a blood test online and have it performed at a medical center on the same day. The sample will be analyzed immediately, and the patient will receive the results in a secure email.

 

After exchanging emails with the doctor, an electronic prescription would be mailed to the pharmacy so that a local one-day delivery post can deliver the medication the next day.

 

This can be done within 24 hours, minimizing the patient’s anxiety and expenses and freeing up the medical team to deliver better care to more patients.

 

Consolidating information from various databases, partner applications, and services, HCRM systems permit healthcare providers to view each patient's complete medical history, appointments, insurance, preferences, and social determinants of health.

 

For instance, in-home providers can assess detailed information to identify factors that might cause patients to need medical care. These insights help orchestrate reminders or targeted campaigns around relevant services. Nearly real-time updates to electronic medical profiles speed up patient service. 

 

Analysis of patient feedback, complaints, and other gathered data help healthcare providers evaluate the quality of their services and take appropriate and timely actions to improve them.

 

For example, some organizations use medical CRM tools to collect, via email, patients’ feedback before and after surgery and after recovery. Similarly, health insurance companies collect feedback from numerous clinics to generate valuable reports.

 

Doctors and staff

Clinical care is increasingly complex. Health care teams need to act decisively to deliver coordinated care. HCRM tools help make crucial patient information from various groups, devices, and systems updates nearly real-time when and where needed.

 

They also ease the administrative workload with automated messaging that frees up the staff to better serve patients at the office.

 

A custom medical CRM system, as well as a doctor appointment system, can also take care of doctors’ schedules, for example, by finding the most suitable appointment slots, sending notifications, building routes for house calls, rescheduling appointments, and more.

 

Business

Medical CRM systems automate billing, resource management, customer service, and other internal processes and foster easy and secure communication and data exchange for the staff.

 

They help synchronize healthcare management with providers and third parties like pharmacies or insurance agencies, monitor the sales pipeline, improve operational time and overall performance, and optimize expenses.

 

Real-time dashboards and reports give healthcare organizations an instant overview of their operations and performance and insights into patient data.

 

They help streamline daily tasks to increase employee efficiency and customer satisfaction. Improving patient satisfaction quickly based on a close examination of patients’ feedback is another competitive advantage.

 

Cloud-based healthcare CRM solutions seamlessly record, transmit, and store patient data coming from an increasing number of medical devices, applications, etc. They are equally suitable for small and large healthcare organizations and provide for low maintenance costs.

 

HCRM systems can parse through the wealth of customer information to deliver actionable intelligence. The CRM-supported understanding of patient demographics promotes the adoption of high-value patients and prospects.

 

Marketers can develop more intelligent strategies for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers, lowering customer acquisition costs.

 

 

Key Features of Healthcare CRM Software

 

Patient management

Healthcare CRM software helps medical staff handle appointments, documents, prescriptions, and other patient-related activities at any time from anywhere.

 

A calendar can automate appointment reminders, track appointments and no-shows, and help reschedule if needed. Automated patient information management eliminates the need for patients to fill out forms each time.

 

Integrating critical back-office systems ensures consistency across patient records and promotes the timely filing of claims and invoices. Healthcare CRM systems can generate bills, track payments, and send automatic reminders for late payments. 

 

The ability to generate and maintain detailed patient profiles allows healthcare providers to maintain a panoramic view of each patient, craft personalized customer journeys, and access powerful analytics and real-time reporting.

 

Read Also: How to Implement Telehealth for Chronic Care Management

 

Team management

The best CRM solutions can help make team management fast and straightforward — even from a smartphone. A task management tool helps assign work quickly, and integrating with an HRM module facilitates managing employees’ vacations, sick days, etc., and payroll.

 

Medication management

Some tools facilitate the management of medicines, such as sending electronic prescriptions to the pharmacy. Many patients also expect doctors to send reminders about their medication schedules. Some HCRM systems have a function that can do this automatically.

 

Communications

Healthcare CRM software facilitates secure and industry-compliant communication with current and potential patients through their preferred channels. For example, the software can send out automated messages based on predetermined rules, such as:

 

• appointment reminders
• post-appointment feedback surveys
• post-discharge and follow-up emails with health tips and relevant healthcare service suggestions
• discounts on prenatal yoga classes and advice to new moms
• birthday cards
• annual screening reminders
• welcome emails to first-time visitors of your website

 

Medical CRM solutions may come with a chatbot to respond to patients’ concerns 24/7. They also provide strategic insights for creating targeted content.

 

HCRM tools also facilitate sending tailored direct mail messages to patients and physicians. Such campaigns can include regular service communications, screening reminders, referral communications, nurse recruitment mailers, and more.

 

Fast and efficient automated communication between providers, healthcare staff, and teams is essential. Sometimes, medical personnel use their mobile phones and messengers like Skype and WhatsApp for professional communication, which is not secure.

 

A medical CRM can serve as a safe, centralized hub for transparent record-keeping synchronized across touchpoints. It would protect patients’ health information through data encryption, multi-level authentication, digital signatures, etc., and support the storage and transfers of patient data in GDPR or HIPAA-compliant ways.

 

Marketing

Modern CRM tools help plan, implement, and review marketing campaigns across multiple channels: email, direct mail, SMS, and social media.

 

But today’s healthcare marketers need real-time or near real-time data from a comprehensive robust platform that includes and integrates healthcare CRM, EHR, CMS, MAP, call centers, and a content rationalization system (CRS).

 

Many specialized CRM solutions allow segmenting patients based on demographics, psychographics, high-risk health issues, etc. They pinpoint consumers who are likely to need a health system’s services at a procedure level.

 

This helps marketers create targeted marketing campaigns, and physicians precisely target groups of patients that are likely to be profitable.

 

The availability of detailed patient profiles and integration with Facebook and other social networks facilitates sending newsletters with personalized health tips, educational event alerts, or discounts on appropriate medical treatments.  

 

Cutting-edge tools with integrated email templates help distribute tailored, engaging emails and manage deals easier. They track marketing progress throughout the campaign lifecycle, provide real-time performance information, and deliver insights into success and failures.

 

Reports on marketing campaigns and outreach efforts that attribute leads, conversions, and revenue to tactics, campaigns, and even their specific aspects make it easier for health systems to measure their campaigns’ effectiveness and Return on Investment.

 

 

 

Dashboards and reporting

The growth rate for data in the healthcare industry is one of the fastest in the industry. On a modern healthcare platform, various healthcare data flows seamlessly across applications, devices, teams, and points of care.

 

Medical CRM software parses this data to create all types of customized reports and provide a 360-degree view of the consumers. The analysis can produce valuable insights to drive the healthcare organization’s administrative, marketing, and outreach efforts.

 

For example, an open issues report may organize patients’ complaints or malfunctioning equipment.

 

 

Referrals management

Healthcare CRM software helps streamline and track relationships and coordinate the care across specialties, departments, and facilities.

 

For example, if it detects that a patient whom a general practitioner referred to a specialist hasn’t arranged an appointment, it will notify the healthcare facility. They will contact the patient and resume the interrupted care.

 

There are also tools for monitoring trends, case and payer mixes, and the overall impact of a healthcare organization’s referral and outbound communication activities.

 

Recruiting management

Healthcare CRM tools also play a vital role in hospitals and specialty practices to engage doctors and nurses.

 

There are tools for communications, management of outreach campaigns with response tracking and automated follow-up, and analytics. Response data and trends may help organizations refine their recruitment approach and stimulate interest.

 

These tools assist in tracking and managing physician relations or liaison outreach activities and help tie changes in physician loyalty directly to physician relations/liaison actions. This empowers health systems to measure the impact of their outreach efforts and adjust their growth strategies accordingly.

 

Main Steps to Create a Custom Healthcare CRM

Now let’s look at the step-by-step pipeline of custom healthcare CRM development:

Step #1 Choose a reliable technology partner

Pay close attention to the vendor’s expertise in the healthcare sphere, ask for their portfolio, and read feedback from customers on authoritative sources like Clutch and GoodFirms. With the right full-cycle development team, you can be sure that they’ll take care of the following steps.

 

Step #2 Conduct a product discovery

At this stage, specialists investigate your product concept, target audience, and intended market. Also, they discuss your business goals, design a proper roadmap, and tune up a streamlined development process. 

 

Step #3 Design UI and UX

The design of a healthcare CRM system both for the patients and the doctors is based on user-friendly principles. During the UI/UX design, the design team maps the user journey and makes sure navigation is clear. 

 

Step #4 Develop a product’s functionality

Here, tech gurus write the features from scratch, integrate third-party services, and implement security measures.

 

Step #5 Quality assurance

QA specialists conduct precise product quality tests to spot and fix possible issues at the earliest stage.

 

Step #6 Release the MVP

Then, the team launches your MVP to test the idea with minimal losses and add new modules and functionality as the product grows.

 

Step #7 Gather feedback and improve

Finally, your tech partner conducts various updates and maintenance work based on your users’ feedback. 

 

The Cost to Build a Healthcare CRM System

To calculate the healthcare CRM development cost, first you need to consider top influencing factors that make up the overall cost of product development. The most important of them are the following:

 

• The number of modules
• Product complexity
• App development type (native, hybrid, or web app)
• The technology stack (tools, languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.)
• Cooperation model (in-house, outsource, or freelance)
• The development team size
• The development team location

 

Since one of the most influential cost factors is functionality included into your medical CRM, let’s take the most necessary modules and the time required to implement them.

And now let’s consider one more essential factor that impacts the total healthcare CRM cost - the company’s development rates. These rates vary from country to country. So, below we compare the minimum and maximum rates of the following countries:

Source: Clutch

 

Concerning the team size, here is the number of specialists you may need to develop a medical CRM:

 

• 2-3 Backend developers
• 2 Frontend developers
• 1 UI/UX designer
• 1 QA engineer
• 1 Project manager

 

We shared an approximate estimation of CRM development with a basic feature set. If you want to calculate the exact cost of your future customer relationship management system, please don’t hesitate to contact our team and discuss your project in detail.

 

 

Challenges of Medical CRM Development

CRM development, especially in the healthcare sector, involves some challenges. Thus, to be forewarned and forearmed when building a CRM system, you will want to pay close attention to the following challenges.

 

Handling data security concerns

Medical facilities store large quantities of valuable data about management, patients, and finance. Implementing a CRM system into already existing healthcare infrastructure can potentially disorganize your data.

 

It’s important to choose a reliable CRM system and a professional technical team to implement it all safely and securely. A unified cloud-based customer relationship management system and experienced development team is are vital to an easy and smooth transition of data.

 

Poor CRM product fit

CRM product fit is vital to its successful implementation. Sometimes there might be inconsistencies in the product fit. Here are some examples:

 

• The product isn’t flexible enough to allow for deeper customizations to fit with the organization's growing needs.

 

• The product isn’t keeping pace with current CRM trends, such as global, social, and mobile.

 

• The product isn’t intuitive or user-friendly, thereby hindering user adoption.

 

The solution is to conduct adequate due diligence at the product selection stage to ensure the CRM system fits not only the current business needs, but also the organization's further evolving needs.

 

Ensuring infrastructure streamlined performance and scalability

It’s vital to ensure that your CRM is scalable enough to cope with the growth plans of the healthcare institution. The CRM infrastructure has to be fully equipped to cover business needs.

 

Any disruptions in the CRM performance or scalability can negatively impact customer experience. You need to ensure that your platform can deal with high-load tasks and data, scale with the business needs, and cope easily with possible crashes.

 

 

 

Onix’s Experience in Medical CRM Development

Onix is a leading development company with hands-on experience in designing and developing robust healthcare products.

 

Over the past 20 years of working with the healthcare sector, we have provided the following services: health monitoring solutions, medical CRM development, healthcare mobile apps development, medical data management, and patient care management solutions.

 

Onix tech gurus help businesses solve challenges in medical CRM development using custom solutions and innovation. For example, we’ve recently developed a doctor appointment app that helps medical staff manage their schedules easily when visiting patients at their homes or other facilities.

 

 

With our custom approach to healthcare CRM development, we helped automate business processes, reduce operating costs, and improve patients’ experience for this project.

 

If you’re considering a medical CRM project and looking for a reliable tech partner, we’d be glad to build a dedicated development team. 

 

Final Thoughts

If you are an IT entrepreneur, it’s reasonable to invest in your own software product. If you are a healthcare organization, you can choose from a vast selection of healthcare CRM software in the market.

 

However, as each company is unique, and it may be challenging to find a solution that meets your specific needs. A custom-built system can address these needs, as well as help avoid unnecessary expenses associated with unused modules of ready-made solutions.

 

If you have questions or need any help with realizing your project, please don’t hesitate to contact Onix’s experts!

 

FAQ

 

What are the benefits of CRM in Healthcare?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can provide several benefits in healthcare, including:

 

- Improved patient experience: By using CRM, healthcare providers can personalize patient care, communicate more effectively, and provide a better overall patient experience.

 

- Increased patient engagement: With CRM, healthcare providers can engage with patients through multiple channels and provide relevant information and education, which can help patients take better care of their health.

 

- Enhanced communication: CRM can facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients, as well as among healthcare providers themselves, leading to more coordinated and effective care.

 

- Improved patient outcomes: By using CRM to manage patient data and track patient progress, healthcare providers can identify potential health risks, intervene earlier, and provide more proactive care, leading to better patient outcomes.

 

What role does CRM play in the hospital industry?

Customer Relationship Management is an important tool for hospitals as it helps them to better manage patient data and relationships.

 

It also allows them to identify potential areas of improvement in the overall management of their operations. By leveraging CRM, hospitals can track patients’ medical records, interactions with staff, billing information, and more.

 

The main problems of developing a medical CRM

Developing a medical CRM can be challenging due to several factors, including:

 

- Compliance with Regulatory Requirements: Healthcare data is sensitive, and developing a medical CRM that complies with regulatory requirements can be challenging. Developers must ensure that their CRM meets standards such as HIPAA and GDPR and implement robust security protocols to protect patient data.

 

- Interoperability Issues: A medical CRM must be able to integrate with other healthcare systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), medical billing, and appointment scheduling systems. Ensuring interoperability between different systems can be complex and require significant development resources.

 

- Integration with Clinical Workflow: A medical CRM must integrate with the clinical workflow, including physician and nursing workflows. This can be challenging, as the CRM must be designed to complement existing workflows rather than disrupt them.