What is a CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management and is typically referenced when describing a software platform that stores and manages customer data and activity. A CRM for a medical practice will help the front desk team or patient coordinators boost their efficiency. They can schedule patients faster, make informed decisions, and unify their communication strategies.
Using a CRM to Schedule Patients
Using a CRM platform for your medical practice, allows your patient scheduling team to have full access to purchase and appointment history as well as all communication history with the practice. When they are talking to a patient, whether it’s face to face or on the phone, they can easily see an activity log or marketing communication, personal communication, attendance history, and recommended treatment plans. Seeing all of this information helps the patient coordinator communicate with the patient productively and saves time.
Time Management for Patient Scheduling
In a medical practice, your front desk team is the front line of your communication to patients both inside and outside of the office. Communication and service to patients physically in the office should always be the highest priority. This can be difficult to manage if the staff’s workload includes tasks like logging activities, looking up patient contact details, following up with leads, placing appointment reminders, or following up with patient recalls. Implementing a CRM can automate this type of manual labor, which frees up time to focus on patient care.
Automating and Standardizing Patient Communication
A CRM tool allows a team of patient coordinators to unify their communication tactics and ensures that no patient is left out of important communication. When placing phone calls to new leads or existing patients, coordinators can use call scripts that show them important information to relay to the patient based on the appointment type or procedure of interest. Email and SMS messaging can be templated to eliminate manual work of typing answers to common FAQ’s by patients. Automatic activity logs also allow a coordinator to reference historical communication to the patient, whether it was an automated communication or manual communication placed by a colleague.
Make Better Decisions For a Medical Practice
Part of tracking patient and lead activity history includes rolling up that data into conversion metrics for the practice. This allows the practice owners and managers to set goals based on their key performance indicators (KPI’s). Placing tracking phone numbers and tagging contact forms allows your marketing team to see how many leads you are getting from all your marketing channels. From those leads, your CRM would tell you how many converted to scheduled appointments. Once a patient is on your schedule, your CRM reporting will show you what your patient attendance and purchase rates are. You’ll also be able to see how many of your first-time patients come back for repeat visits and what their total lifetime value is as the years go by.