Healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) software has seen tremendous growth over the past several years. The pandemic has greatly contributed to the digitalization of medical fields and the integration of patient-care services, and medical institutions and start-ups seek healthcare CRM development as they seek affordable, comprehensive, and convenient services for their patients.

Healthcare CRM's future looks bright. In 2021, its market was estimated at USD 12.7 billion; by 2030, it is anticipated to reach USD 31.5 billion, with compound annual growth rates estimated at 10.6%. As AI technologies and cloud services mature further, healthcare CRM software will benefit private practitioners, small clinics, and hospitals immensely, making medical tech founders naturally eager to acquire a piece of this lucrative pie.

This blog will introduce the specificities of CRM software development for healthcare, outlining its key features, benefits, and challenges to help navigate.

What is Healthcare CRM Software?

Simply put, healthcare CRM software is an electronic platform designed to manage customer relationships in the healthcare industry. Such solutions analyze a range of data sources pertaining to individual customers, including demographic information, health histories, insurance payers, social behavioral information, and so forth.

Analysis of this data gives healthcare organizations valuable insights into patient habits and patterns, which in turn enable them to gain an intimate knowledge of each of their patients so that they can develop tailored engagement strategies tailored specifically for each one. A scientific way of engaging with people also helps organizations build lasting relationships since people feel like interactions happen on their terms rather than with force from outsiders.

Types of Healthcare CRM Software

CRM systems vary according to the functions performed and organizations' goals:

Type 1: Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM software solutions enable data collection and analysis to produce valuable insights on how best to approach, interact with, and engage patients. With tailored treatment tailored specifically for their needs and long-term customer relations in mind, people will likely choose your medical services more frequently - which in turn ensures lifelong customer loyalty and retention.

Type 2: Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM allows companies to communicate more efficiently across departments while also providing multi-channel customer support, making it ideal for enterprise organizations that employ different departments for different operations.

Establishing reliable communications with clients includes sending emails, greeting cards, and information on new services. Afterward, the system analyzes this data with multiple-channel communication strategies tailored to individual patient preferences.

Type 3: Operational CRM

Operational CRM assists companies in automating and streamlining operations-related activities like pre-sales, marketing, lead generation, etc. In turn, this frees up time and resources for more important business-critical tasks that engage and retain more clients rather than running repetitive processes. Therefore, operational CRM allows medical facilities to increase overall performance while reinforcing workflows and reducing overhead expenses.

Key Features of Healthcare CRM Software

Your healthcare CRM may come equipped with its own set of features depending on your business needs and personal preferences. Still, most solutions typically provide patient data management, task management, sales & marketing management, and analytics modules, which, in turn, may come equipped with features that stand out.

Features 1: Patient Data Management

Healthcare CRMs rely heavily on patient data management as the cornerstone of their service offering. By centralizing all pertinent patient details such as personal details, appointments, and billing history into one database, healthcare CRM systems create an omni-view of each individual and enable faster patient service.

Hospital-Wide Integrations

To gain a holistic patient view and ensure consistent patient care, your CRM solution must integrate with electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), patient portals, and other hospital systems.

Centralized Patient Database

A centralized data repository enables physicians to ensure all patient records are updated and readily available, significantly streamlining communication and increasing accuracy when it comes to diagnoses.

Feature 2: Task Management and Collaboration

A medical CRM streamlines front-office and back-office operations. Hence, a healthcare facility runs efficiently, from patient intake to prescription tracking.

Appointment Management

CRMs can be used to schedule, edit, and manage appointments, as well as send automated reminders and notifications directly to doctors and patients.

Prescription Management

Healthcare practitioners can quickly validate prescriptions against patient profiles before sending them electronically to pharmacies for immediate fulfillment.

Medical Billing and Invoicing

Healthcare CRMs provide financial management assistance by keeping track of medical billings, taxes and wages of staff, procurement needs, and more.

Feature 3: Sales and Marketing Automation

Healthcare marketing is essential to practices and institutions looking to build stronger patient relationships by expanding brand recognition, increasing strategic outreach efforts, and cultivating more intimate interactions with their patients. A healthcare CRM solution can enable marketing teams to leverage tailored promotions while simultaneously nurturing leads.

Email Marketing and Newsletters

A healthcare CRM can automatically organize and customize email campaigns around special offers and promotions.

Feedback Collection

Utilizing CRM in combination with a patient portal allows healthcare practitioners to easily collect patient feedback in order to enhance the quality of services provided.

Referrals Management

Healthcare CRMs can facilitate patient referrals by facilitating secure data exchange about each individual and supporting collaboration among practitioners.

Features 4: Reporting and Analytics

An analytics module strives to deliver invaluable insight from all collected data in order to uncover winning strategies and any weak spots within patient-provider relationships.

Patient Analytics

By accessing vast amounts of personal information stored in their CRMs, marketers can better segment patients based on demographics, diagnosis, and length of appointment information to create more tailored offerings and ensure superior patient care.

Physician Performance Analytics

By monitoring and assessing the performance of medical staff, you can keep on top of their workload and prevent burnout while understanding which services bring in more revenue.

Custom Report Generation

A medical CRM must allow for custom report creation according to your needs, such as to compare the ROI of different campaigns or track patient numbers across departments.

Step-by-step Process of Developing Healthcare CRM Software?

No matter whether you are developing a CRM for hospitals or private practitioners, a sound strategy must be in place before beginning work on it. Here's how you can get going:

Step 1: Choose A Healthcare CRM Development Partner

As a founder of a medical start-up, you must focus on other areas of the business. Therefore, it is wise to work with an established CRM software developer. Working with experienced developers reduces time to market while often at reduced costs.

Many founders opt to outsource CRM software development services from companies. Their teams of developers and designers help build profitable products with product market fit, fast scale-up teams for technology start-ups in healthcare, and customer-centric approaches that foster remarkable growth with lasting partnerships between client companies and these service providers.

Step 2: Ensuring You Have the Appropriate Talents

Healthcare CRM software development can be more challenging than some business apps, requiring not one but multiple experienced software engineers and expert developers specializing in their respective disciplines to complete this challenging project.

Backend developers create and deploy the underlying business logic and databases on cloud or on-premise servers. In contrast, front-end developers build functional apps for patients, doctors, and staff.
Front-end developers deliver functional apps for patients, doctors, and staff.
UI/UX designers craft an excellent user experience through well-planned layouts & controls.
Quality Assurance Engineers prevent major bugs from sneaking through into production releases.
Project Managers direct all aspects of medical CRM development team activities.
Business analysts analyze your requirements to technical specifications.

Step 3: Discuss Business Requirements

A professional software development team will consult and collaborate with you in order to accurately meet the business requirements for their software. Throughout this process, they will walk through various steps with you so the end product aligns with what was pictured in your head - including.

Establish project goals, specifically the intended use of healthcare CRMs such as software that suggests recommendations or an operational CRM with user-friendly automation features.
An initial discovery stage wherein the product team conducts user research and prototype development before testing tech feasibility to ensure a user-friendly product with optimal market fit is created.
To validate their software features and hypotheses, designers and product managers conduct interviews and surveys with likely users of their software products.
After identifying immediate priorities, they focus their efforts on creating the minimum viable product (MVP). They might assess existing CRM software in order to shorten development times and select suitable tech stacks.
App developers perform an audit on existing healthcare software or conduct tech research if creating one from scratch to reduce development time costs and select an ideal tech stack for your project.

Step 4: Kickstart Design and Development

With all features and specifications clearly laid out, CRM development teams begin designing the framework, data storage, and backend of healthcare apps using appropriate tech stacks. User experience design (UI/UX design) plays just as much of an integral role as code APIs or microservices powering an app's operation.

An effective user experience design ensures that doctors, patients, and other users can intuitively use an app. In order to do this:

Designers use user journey mapping and well-designed UI elements such as menus, typography, and app layouts at every interaction point to meet this goal.
UX designers simplify how users act on an app by decreasing the steps necessary to complete specific actions.
They use easily digestible instructions to get users acquainted with it quickly and effectively.

Developers employ reliable third-party suppliers, encrypt users' data securely, and work out any bugs during development - leading to a user-friendly, secure, and functional CRM application for your clients.

Step 5: Test, Deploy & Support

To ensure the CRM is reliable, developers conduct numerous tests across different stages. They incorporate user feedback and make any necessary modifications before deploying it. After the deployment has taken place, ongoing support from your development team should help to address teething issues as well as provide opportunities to make improvements over time.

Major Challenges of Healthcare CRM Software Development

Medical CRM solutions have become indispensable tools that help hospitals effectively manage and develop relationships with patients. From appointment planners and reporting capabilities to appointment calendars that streamline internal workflows and BI reporting capabilities. You can customize a CRM system to fit your specific requirements.

Due to the highly complex healthcare environment, developing a healthcare CRM comes with its own set of challenges.

Challenge 1: Strict Regulatory Compliance

Healthcare is one of the most heavily regulated industries due to its direct effect on people's lives, necessitating compliance with over 600 discrete regulatory requirements in the US alone.

An effective healthcare CRM system must always adhere to the principles and requirements of HIPAA/HITECH (US), GDPR (EU), PIPEDA (Canada), or other local regulations, which may vary depending on where it's being implemented.

Challenge 2: Patient Data Protection

The healthcare industry experienced over 330 data breaches that exposed over 19 million patient records in 2022 alone. As healthcare CRMs typically hold sensitive personal information of patients, failing to implement adequate security measures could leave vulnerable patient records susceptible to being exploited by cyber-criminals.

End-to-end data encryption, identity and access management, multi-factor authentication, staff training, and other safeguards should be implemented to secure healthcare data.

Challenge 3: Healthcare Interoperability

Healthcare interoperability refers to the ability of various health systems to cooperate so as to allow the free flow of medical data. In order to optimize the patient’s outcome, interoperability ensures timely and secure access to health data.

Your healthcare CRM must seamlessly interact with existing tools, platforms, and systems to enhance the quality of service while eliminating duplicate data entry. That is why the development team must have experience building robust APIs and integrating third-party applications.

Benefits of Healthcare CRM Software Development

Below, we have outlined the advantages of adopting healthcare CRM software.

Benefit 1: Patient Records

One of the key aspects of effective treatments is maintaining patient records. Every time someone comes in for therapy, their past medical history plays an essential part in their treatment journey.

Accessing past medical records assists physicians in making an informed decision about continuing treatment. Hence, CRM provides healthcare practitioners with a central platform to store vital patient data quickly and access it when needed.

One platform like this helps healthcare firms ensure patient data is complete and up-to-date without difficulty. Do you wish to integrate something similar? Custom healthcare software development services can assist.

Benefit 2: Customized Patient Interaction

Patients are more likely to feel connected and at ease when their interactions with doctors are tailored specifically to meet their needs, which you can do using a healthcare CRM or custom software development. Custom software development has truly revolutionized healthcare over the years!

CRMs designed specifically for doctors can aid them in tailoring their approach to every patient by giving them access to individual client data.

Benefit 3: Resource Management Automation

A CRM system helps facilitate scheduling time for specialists while keeping in mind insight, location, and appointment criteria. Furthermore, its scheduling software frequently changes appointments while notifying patients accordingly.

Benefit 4: Tracking Patient Appointments

Suppose a patient fails to make their scheduled appointments. In that case, healthcare professionals can easily notify and contact the patient quickly so they don't miss any further charges and risk health problems or financial losses for themselves or the healthcare organization. An excellent plan such as this will also prevent patient health problems as well as financial losses for healthcare organizations.

Benefit 5: 24*7 Assistance

Human availability may differ between patients. Therefore, CRM chatbots can be invaluable resources in providing essential medical advice 24/7.

Benefit 6: Increased Patient Satisfaction

CRM in healthcare can automate appointment reminders and permit rapid rescheduling if patients arrive late for appointments, as well as manage comprehensive personal data about each patient (gender, date of birth, medical history, etc.). Furthermore, this system utilizes this data to send notifications reminding users to take their medications on schedule or arrive early at their next appointment.

Benefit 7: Data Security

Healthcare organizations gather massive amounts of patient data, making them vulnerable to malware attacks and data breaches due to this information.

Make sure that user data remains private by choosing a trusted CRM system. Any accidental or deliberate data breach won't be possible with properly secured healthcare CRMs; such safeguards contribute towards increasing patient participation.

Benefit 8: Lower Administrative Overhead

Healthcare staff can easily automate many tedious and repetitive operations using CRM software to increase team productivity while decreasing errors. This increases team efficiency while reducing risks.

Auto quantitative work frees up staff resources to be put towards other essential tasks, increasing productivity while decreasing errors and eliminating personnel requirements, ultimately enabling teams to accomplish more with limited resources.

Benefit 9: Effective Marketing

CRM stands for customer relationship management, which describes its ability to streamline marketing initiatives for improved outcomes. By sending personalized messages and emails with up-to-date research findings, treatments, insurance plans, and other pertinent updates directly to patients in healthcare industry settings, such a platform would benefit every patient involved in healthcare industry operations.

Patients respond more favorably when they know that everything has been planned specifically for their situation, which medical staff can accomplish efficiently with the aid of a healthcare CRM system. A tailored approach for every patient builds strong relationships while at the same time yielding 2X leads.

Benefit 10: Lower Operational Costs

Medical institutions are for-profit businesses, so keeping operational costs under control is of vital importance. According to the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, operational expenses in the US healthcare system will reach $60 billion by 2022. Modern medical CRM software can reduce operating expenses as well as human errors by using time-saving features that minimize unnecessary expenditure and costs.

Conclusion

Healthcare CRM will continue to transform the medical industry positively. The market for healthcare CRM has expanded exponentially, helping medical organizations increase revenue and generate leads more easily. Furthermore, CRM enables healthcare organizations to add custom features that fit their system while meeting organizational requirements more accurately.

Building a custom healthcare CRM has become imperative for health institutions and practices that seek to move towards more personalized and patient-centric care. A medical CRM's rich functionality can automate time-consuming workflows, streamline patient management processes, and personalize care delivery.

Given the complex nature of CRM software development for healthcare, you must partner with a tech partner with relevant expertise who can walk you through every step of a CRM development project. Reach out to us now to start developing your own healthcare CRM software!