While healthcare leaders may know what a CRM is and the value it can provide to their teams, it can be hard to distinguish what sets certain CRM solutions apart. Luckily Mike Hiltunen, President at MedStar Consultants, presented on choosing a healthcare CRM at October's Mayo Clinic Leveraging the Lab conference.
What is a CRM
CRM, in its purest form, refers to strategies and technologies to help organizations manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the consumer lifecycle - from first marketing touch to the sales cycle to activation to upsell. Mike also adds in the goal of improving business relationships with customers and prospects.
In the past, customer relationships were managed on spreadsheets and paper notes, with little to no accountability, visibility, or follow up. Even static Excel documents leave no space to collaborate with other team members and other departments. CRM combines sales updates, client issues, and account information into a single platform.
CRM & Laboratory Outreach
According to Mike, 34% of laboratory outreach teams are currently using a CRM solution, while 7% plan on acquiring one soon. Want to know if your lab should be thinking about a CRM? Here are some signs you may need one:
- You are losing more clients than you are gaining
- There is no single source for information
- There is little or no visibility
- Reports are tedious and painful
- Your lab is losing data
- Every customer is treated the same
- Your team has no idea how the lab is performing from a customers viewpoint
- Sales isn't sure where the best leads are coming from
- There is no visibility into sales activities
- Your team is unable to convert leads into opportunities
Selecting a CRM
Most CRM solutions offer similar product offerings, but healthcare organizations need to dig a bit deeper. Generic CRM platforms are unable to accommodate the clinical and diagnostic complexities of healthcare, and are often not compliant.
This is why hc1 invented Healthcare Relationship Management (HRM) - a concept built from the ground up for healthcare organizations to leverage the power of CRM, live analytics, and secure collaboration in a built-for-healthcare environment. Labs have an incredible amount of patient data at their disposal, but the potential value of this data is lost across various data silos. The hc1 HRM platform is HIPAA-compliant, quick to activate, and helps organizations stay compliant.
You can learn more about HRM here.
Take a tour of the hc1 HRM platform here.
