Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in healthcare represents a transformative approach that enables health systems to personalize interactions throughout the customer lifecycle to meet customer expectations and influence behavior. While patient engagement and outreach is a primary focus, CRM capabilities extend to managing relationships with physicians, caregivers, community partners, payors, and donors. The platform also serves internal departments like Human Resources, Philanthropy, and Community Relations teams by providing tools to manage their unique constituent relationships and engagement needs.
Digital solutions in this space integrate consumer data analytics, omnichannel communication capabilities, and advanced workflow automation to enable healthcare organizations to deliver personalized experiences at scale while optimizing operational efficiency.
Customer relationship management framework
| Patient engagement and outreach | |
Marketing optimization | Platforms that enable targeted outreach, campaign automation, and ROI tracking through data-driven insights and consumer analytics to acquire and retain patients effectively. Example companies: Cured, Salesforce, WebMD Ignite, Personify |
Call center optimization | Solutions that streamline contact center operations through unified service desks, intelligent routing, and comprehensive patient views to improve first-call resolution and patient satisfaction. Example companies: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, TalkDesk, Cogito |
Personalized engagement | Tools that enable personalized patient interactions across touchpoints by leveraging historical engagement data, preferences, and predictive analytics. Example companies: Salesforce, CipherHealth, OneView, Microsoft Dynamics 365 |
Care coordination | Platforms that facilitate care team collaboration, care plan management, and patient communication to improve outcomes and reduce gaps in care. Example companies: CipherHealth, Epic, Salesforce |
| Care delivery and operations | |
Physician alignment | Solutions for managing physician relationships, analyzing referral patterns, and optimizing network utilization to improve care coordination and market share. Example companies: Trilliant Health, Definitive Healthcare, ReferralMD |
Strategic and operational planning | Analytics solutions that leverage CRM data to inform strategic decisions around service line planning, facility operations, and market expansion. Example companies: Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Personify |
Population health management | Tools that integrate CRM capabilities with clinical data to identify at-risk populations, manage care programs, and measure outcomes at scale. Example companies: Epic, Salesforce, Personify, WebMD Ignite |
The case for customer relationship management
As patients’ relationship with health systems becomes more akin to consumer experiences in other industries, healthcare organizations face mounting pressure to anticipate, understand, and respond to consumer behavior. Traditional approaches to patient engagement lack the personalization and consistency that modern healthcare consumers expect. While health systems recognize the need to transform their consumer relationships, they struggle to deliver personalized experiences at scale without robust digital solutions that can unify clinical and non-clinical patient data and orchestrate interactions across touchpoints.
Personalize and enhance consumer experience
Drive growth through streamlined acquisition
In today’s competitive healthcare landscape, health systems struggle to effectively attract new patients and retain existing ones without a data-driven approach to consumer engagement. CRM platforms enable organizations to identify high-value growth opportunities through predictive analytics and propensity modeling while automating targeted outreach to the right consumers at the right time. Health systems implementing these solutions have seen dramatic results, including an improvement in marketing campaign effectiveness and an increase in new patient acquisition rates (AVIA Insights). Furthermore, by leveraging consumer insights to personalize engagement strategies, organizations can achieve higher patient retention rates and significantly increased lifetime patient value through improved service line utilization.
Automate processes and improve operational efficiency
Sources
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- https://www.redpointglobal.com/press-releases/80-of-patients-prefer-to-use-digital-communication-to-interact-with-healthcare-providers-and-brands/
- https://www.sequencehealth.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-aht-in-a-call-center-top-strategies,
https://www.qliqsoft.com/ultimate-guide/to/healthcare-call-center-software
