How to Choose the Best Healthcare CRM Software
CRMs are big business. Indeed, the healthcare CRM market alone is predicted to be worth almost $21.5bn (Around £18bn) by 2025. With so much choice out there, choosing a CRM for healthcare marketing can be a real challenge.
This guide on how to choose the right healthcare CRM platform is designed to simplify your search, giving you a good idea of the key questions to answer before deciding on a single medical CRM.
What is a healthcare CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, but when people talk about “a CRM” they’re usually referring to the software suite that lets organisations manage those customer relationships. CRMs used to be all about funnelling sales, but these days a high-quality CRM can integrate customer information and company data across sales, marketing, service, IT and even ecommerce functions.
The best healthcare CRM software helps medical companies find, keep and engage with potential and existing customers, allowing providers to offer a greater degree of personalisation and targeted marketing of their health and wellbeing services.
What is the difference between CRM and CMS?
It’s easy to confuse these two acronyms, especially as they both refer to essential systems needed to run a successful customer-facing website.
Where a CRM keeps track of leads and existing customers by recording and reporting the interactions they have with your site, a Content Management System (CMS) is the back-end platform that allows users to manage and upload content to a website. All sites have a CMS of some kind, but a good medical CRM system is key to getting the most from your relationships with existing and prospective patients.
How to choose the right healthcare CRM platform
The following are what we consider the top criteria for choosing a healthcare CRM platform. Answer these questions before approaching a developer, and you’ll be well prepared to help them build the best healthcare CRM software for your business’s needs.
1. Which area(s) of your business will a new CRM benefit?
As we mentioned earlier, a medical CRM can benefit practically every department in your healthcare company. For instance, it could:
- Assist your service team with appointment scheduling
- Integrate with your accounting software to help your billing team invoice patients in a timely fashion
- And enhance your marketing team’s efforts with deeper insights into customer/patient behaviour
How you choose the right healthcare CRM platform depends largely on whether you need your CRM to integrate with one, some, or all of your company’s functions, alongside the budget you have in mind.
2. What day-to-day duties can a CRM’s automation aspects help simplify?
CRM systems are fantastic for automation, which can enormously benefit businesses in the healthcare industry that deal with a lot of appointment bookings and cancellations. However, appointments are only one aspect of how medical CRM automation can help. The best healthcare CRM software can flow patient data into cloud storage, automatically send out patient reminders to help alleviate the expense of missed appointments, and even assist in managing your staff’s timetables.
3. Which existing systems will your new CRM need to integrate with?
Once you have an idea of the departments your CRM will benefit and the tasks it can help simplify, the third of your top criteria for choosing a healthcare CRM platform needs to be platform integrations. From your public-facing website to your payroll platform, and patient records to your e-shop function, the best healthcare CRM software can do it all.
4. How intuitive and expansive do you need your CRM to be?
The obvious answer to this question might be “make it as easy to use as possible.” However, it’s often true that the more features and integrations a piece of software boasts, the more complex it can be to use. Additionally, you may want your medical CRM to be built with the option to add more features in future as your list of services expands. This could therefore add further levels of complexity, which detracts from how intuitive the software proves for end users.
It can be a deft balancing act, but one way to address it is to make a list of which job roles might need to use which parts of the system, and scope out how much training they would require.
For example, if you primarily need a CRM for healthcare marketing, then that training would be limited to your marketing team. A multi-headed system meanwhile might present a larger logistical challenge where training is concerned, to go along with the greater technical challenge of multi-system integrations. Nonetheless, the best healthcare CRM software tends to be modular, meaning different departments can train on the specific area they’ll need for their role. It’s probably only your IT team who might need a full overview for troubleshooting purposes, so we’d suggest starting with them, then rolling out the training as it’s needed across the rest of your business.
5. What security measures and access controls does your CRM need to have in place?
Security should be a major consideration with any software release, so we couldn’t pen a piece on how to choose the best healthcare CRM software without exploring it. However, such are the long list of compliance requirements in the health sector that a medical CRM might present more security concerns than most.
Patient confidentiality might mean only certain healthcare professionals, lab techs and marketing partners should be given access to specific areas of the system. Meanwhile the ever-present threat of data breaches means care must be taken – particularly in an industry where your new CRM is likely to integrate with older legacy systems, which often present vulnerable back doors for enterprising hackers.
We’d advise having at least some idea of which departments and specific team members need to have which level of access to your medical CRM, before you approach a CRM development partner. That will help them to deliver the best healthcare CRM software possible within your given timelines.
Need a bespoke CRM tailored to your exact needs?
At One Beyond we build bespoke CRM systems tailored to every industry. Customised to meet the needs of your business, they’re also fully scalable – meaning you won’t need a new license for each unique user. And because our CRM systems are created with your working processes, legal compliance requirements and existing software in mind, they’re never more complex than they need to be – so your team can hit the ground running on using them from day one.
In addition to our CRM service, we also have a long history building innovative software solutions for the healthcare industry. That means you can trust us to consider every aspect of your medical CRM and build the best healthcare CRM software for your needs, with additional room to grow as your services expand.
Learn about our bespoke CRM service here or see our healthcare case studies to see how we’ve helped wellbeing providers solve their tech challenges. You can also explore other aspects of digital transformation in healthcare in our blog on that very subject.
Interested in working with us? Get in touch to set up a call.
