Customer relationship management (CRM) in healthcare is the technology that makes inquiries that used to require a phone call are now handled over email, text message, web form, or chatbot possible. CRM systems bring together multiple information sources to help anyone communicating with customers understand their needs and preferences. For healthcare organizations, there’s an added benefit of insight into clinical encounters and medical conditions. At an individual level, this leads to more personalized engagement and helps build trust with patients. Across the organization, these insights help inform decision-making around marketing efforts, as well as clinical operations.

What Is CRM?

CRM systems aggregate customer data in a shared platform. They provide a record of all interactions the customer has had with the organization and track which workers have interacted with—that is, “touched”—them. These workflows help ensure that individual customers haven’t been neglected. Looking at the bigger picture, analyzing the data collected in CRM systems provides insights into trends that can influence future customer marketing efforts.

What Is a Healthcare CRM?

CRM in healthcare is software that aggregates customer data that is purpose-built for the complexities of the highly regulated healthcare industry. They track clinical care visits (both virtual and in-person), as well as online or telephone inquiries. Ideally, a healthcare CRM system will also include details about a patient’s health, such as diagnoses, prescriptions, and the members of their clinical care team, along with information about insurance coverage and billing history.

Research dating back to the early 2000s has demonstrated a positive correlation between CRM software adoption and higher patient satisfaction, improved efficiency, better resource allocation, and shorter wait times. So, it’s no wonder that the global market for CRM systems in healthcare grew to approximately $18 billion in 2023 and is projected to top $30 billion by 2030, with North America accounting for a 58% share of that total. Demand for structured data, particularly to help improve customer service, is expected to drive this growth.

Key Takeaways

  • CRM in healthcare brings together data on patient behavior with information from past clinical encounters.
  • Leading CRM systems integrate with other enterprise applications, including electronic health records and enterprise resource planning systems, to yield broader insights.
  • Health systems implementing CRM can offer more personalized outreach as they streamline administrative tasks.
  • Key CRM features include workflow automation, patient data management, analytics, and reporting.
  • The longitudinal view of patient data available through a CRM system provides a level of visibility into operations that is unavailable from siloed systems.

Healthcare CRM Explained

A CRM system tracks customer interactions to help an organization give more personalized service. The same is true of CRM in healthcare, with the key difference being the increased complexity of the patient journey, compared with that of a typical customer journey.

As in other settings, health systems use the information in CRM systems to understand why a patient is contacting the organization and determine the next-best action to take. In healthcare, several factors compound this workflow: the need to triage symptoms, furnish customized educational resources, refill a prescription, conduct a telemedicine appointment, or refer a patient to medical specialists with highly variable scheduling requirements.

To achieve this level of understanding about a patient’s needs, CRM in healthcare needs to cover more than call center records. Leading systems integrate demographic information; insurance and billing data; medical information, such as prescriptions and preexisting conditions; history of past appointments; and even information on a patient’s visits to a health system’s website or mobile application.

This isn’t intended only for inbound communication, however. Most healthcare CRMs include features that let marketing teams reach out to patients via email, phone, or text message. They may remind patients to schedule a wellness visit, include links to educational resources, or announce the opening of a new practice. Because messaging is centralized, it’s easy for marketing teams to track how outreach performs and make enhancements that will drive future engagement.

Healthcare CRM vs. EHR

One of the main strengths of a CRM system is its ability to aggregate information from numerous sources, including sources of clinical data. Electronic health records (EHRs), for example, document a patient’s encounters with a health system’s clinical staff, primarily logging in-person appointments but also including virtual visits and electronic messages sent through patient portals.

EHR data is valuable, but it paints an incomplete picture of a patient because it may not include financial, demographic, or social data. Out of the box, EHR systems may also lack the functionality to send automated email or text messages to patients, which can hinder efforts to improve patient outreach. Finally, EHR systems may not support the collection of patient feedback. This is essential for quality improvement—not to mention required under HCAHPS, or the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, the standardized patient satisfaction survey used to measure and publicly report patients’ perspectives on their hospital care experiences. But patient feedback is also often gathered through paper surveys with low response rates.

Healthcare CRM vs. ERP

It’s also worth noting how CRM compares to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. CRM manages customer interactions and supports the front office. Meanwhile, ERP touches a range of back-end business functions that include accounting, procurement, inventory, supply chain management, and distribution. Some ERP systems have a CRM component, but CRM systems do not include ERP and must bring in back-office data through integrations with an ERP system.

8 Benefits of CRM in Healthcare

McKinsey & Company has emphasized the importance of customer centricity for health systems operating in an increasingly competitive environment. Organizations that strive to understand who their patients are and can provide convenient access to what those patients need “have an opportunity to take the lead in transforming the healthcare journey and, in doing so, could unlock material value for consumers and the overall healthcare system,” the consultancy has said.

CRM systems can help unlock this value. By gathering patient data from previously disparate sources, such as call center employees, marketing teams, and other office staff responsible for engaging with patients, health systems are poised to realize several key CRM benefits.

  • Boost patient acquisition: CRM systems in healthcare supply previously unavailable insights into patient behavior. This enables systems to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to attract new patients.
  • Promote patient engagement: CRM allows healthcare organizations to take detailed insights into patients’ needs a step further. They can deliver personalized communication to existing patients based on documented care needs (such as overdue screenings) or stated preferences (such as notifications about weight-loss programs).
  • Strengthen patient loyalty: When health systems demonstrate a commitment to personalized communication and service offerings, patients feel valued and are more appreciative of their interactions with the organization.
  • Save time and resources: Leading CRM tools automate many administrative tasks, such as sending emails, routing phone calls, providing educational resources, and scheduling appointments. This lifts a lot of work off the shoulders of call center and marketing teams.
  • Enhance communication: In addition to personalizing communication, CRM supports omnichannel messaging via email, phone, online chat, or text. Organizations can also use CRM systems to automate messages, such as appointment reminders or alerts to fill out intake forms before visiting the office.
  • Ensure digital compliance: CRM systems designed for use in healthcare help ensure that workflows for aggregating, storing, and analyzing patient data meet the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
  • Automate feedback collection: Surveys and other ways to gather patient feedback are critical for quality improvement and voice of the customer programs. CRM can automate this process by sending email or text links to surveys after an appointment or other interaction with the health system.
  • Enhance resource distribution: With a CRM’s holistic view of how patients engage with a health system and where they receive clinical services, leadership can more efficiently allocate personnel and other resources to meet patients’ needs.

10 Healthcare CRM Key Features

To improve relationships with patients, streamline communication, and automate administrative tasks as described above, health systems need to know what to look for in CRM software. The following 10 CRM features can help a health system make the most of its investment in CRM. While many of these features are standard offerings, it’s worthwhile for organizations to contrast a vendor’s strengths and priorities with their own needs for improving patient relationships.

1. Data Security

Healthcare CRM systems must meet HIPAA’s strict data privacy and security requirements. This means—at minimum—that patient data should be encrypted at rest, in transit, and in use. It also means any correspondence sent to a patient must not include protected health information (PHI). Instead, communications can provide a link to a secure site (such as a patient portal or web form) where PHI can be viewed or entered. Beyond securing communication, CRM tools enable organizations to apply security best practices, such as role-based access or multifactor authentication, to help ensure that users access only the data they need to do their job.

2. Patient Data Management

One of the most important CRM features is the ability to gather previously disparate sources of patient data into a single system. This supports consistency and accuracy in records, which is critical for supporting personalized interactions with patients. Another benefit of data management across the organization is that it relieves clinical and administrative users of the burden of repeatedly asking patients for the same information, which contributes to a poor patient experience.

3. Document Management

Along with charting patient data, such as appointment records, billing history, and aggregated feedback, the CRM system acts as a secure repository for all sales, marketing, and customer service documentation. This feature also makes it easy to view and extract this data, as necessary. In addition, organizations can use the standards-based templates built into a CRM system to create documents, such as invoices or medical certificates, that record services administered to a patient.

4. EHR Integration

CRM systems that integrate with EHR systems allow for seamless sharing of clinical information with nonclinical stakeholders in the organization. For example, call center teams learn more about a patient’s medical condition, which can support more personalized and productive telephone interactions. This degree of data integration also facilitates care coordination and referrals across care settings, which is especially helpful for urgent care, telehealth, or specialty providers that may not use the same EHR system as a large hospital.

5. Workflow Automation

The workflow management features of CRM systems make it possible to automatically assign tasks and manage workflows for both clinical and administrative processes. Automating business processes, such as scheduling appointments, making referrals, sending messages, and creating reports, relieves many of the burdens associated with burnout among medical professionals. Leading systems will filter automated workflows on the fly, for example, by narrowing down a call center agent’s recommendation for urgent care locations to those within a patient’s ZIP code.

6. Appointment Scheduling and Management

CRM can minimize the bother of scheduling healthcare appointments, which has traditionally involved making a phone call. With CRM in place, patients can schedule appointments through websites or applications and receive automated reminders of their visit, including any forms that need to be filled out beforehand. Advanced functionality can guide patients to the right site of care, or to facilities that accept their insurance. The CRM system will also retain a log of past appointments that organizations can use for personalized outreach regarding preventive or condition-specific services.

7. Analytics and Reporting

CRM supports business analytics by generating reports on key performance indicators ranging from appointment-booking rates to patient satisfaction and call center staff performance. This capability, in turn, supports healthcare forecasting, budgeting, and strategic planning on many fronts, such as projecting revenue streams, allocating staff and resources, and refining approaches to patient acquisition. Reports being accessible to a variety of CRM user roles encourages collaboration and improves transparency throughout the organization.

8. Generative AI

Integrating generative AI capabilities into CRM systems makes it much easier for sales, call center, and marketing employees to search for information or generate insights from what they uncover in ever-growing CRM datasets. In addition, generative AI can facilitate the creation of increasingly personalized content, enabling organizations to send highly targeted messages to more patients in less time. That said, it’s beneficial for organizations to take a systematic approach that includes human oversight when AI is used within healthcare CRM systems, especially when it creates content based on CRM data.

9. Customer Support and Service Management

The holistic view of a patient that becomes available within a CRM system empowers call center and administrative staff to extend highly personalized support. Recommendations can be closely tied to a patient’s clinical needs, insurance coverage, scheduling preferences, and so on. Certain CRM system features, such as a common data store, shared task lists, and automated notifications, also mean that organizations will be better positioned to manage and coordinate services across business lines.

10. Marketing Automation

Through their CRM system, organizations can create highly targeted campaigns for current and prospective patients and monitor their effectiveness in real time. Meanwhile, integrating CRM systems with web forms lets healthcare practices capture information without the need for manual data entry. These marketing automation capabilities help marketing teams prioritize their outreach efforts to hit the right demographics, the right communication channels, and the right clinical services.

Challenges Addressed by Healthcare CRM

Health systems adopt CRM largely to gain a longitudinal view of their patients—that is, to see all their interactions over a long period of time—so they can plan how to better meet patients’ needs. Along with enabling personalized outreach, CRM in healthcare helps organizations address some of the operational challenges that exist when patient data is lodged in disparate, incompatible systems.

  • Limited visibility into operational metrics: The reporting capabilities within a CRM system generate insights into important operational metrics, such as how quickly appointments are scheduled and bills are paid, how many patients click through links in outbound messages, and whether patient satisfaction rates are improving. Without a CRM system in place, these metrics are difficult to track because the workflows for patient tasks, such as booking appointments, paying bills, and completing surveys, are all handled by separate applications.
  • Disjointed marketing and sales processes: As people spend more time online, sales strategies must evolve to keep up with customer preferences. This is particularly vital in healthcare, because individual patients have differing needs, patterns of engaging with their care, and preferences for communicating and obtaining information. The integration of sales and marketing workflows within CRM is essential for meeting patients where they are and with the right information.
  • Fragmented data management: Healthcare is notorious for harboring data silos that make longitudinal insights difficult and time-consuming to obtain. Because the CRM system brings together so many sources of patient-centric data, both clinical and administrative users can now see a bird’s eye view of who patients are and how they have been interacting with the organization over time—a view that’s crucial to improving patient outreach, care delivery, and overall operations.

Maximize Healthcare Operations With NetSuite’s CRM

Healthcare market analysts typically advise health organizations to avoid implementing siloed CRM systems that focus on a single use case, whether it’s sales, marketing, patient engagement, or service delivery. When organizations choose such outdated models of CRM, they struggle to obtain meaningful insights from their disparate systems.

Healthcare organizations can benefit from choosing NetSuite’s integrated CRM solution, the healthcare and life sciences version of which is capable of delivering a longitudinal view of patient preferences and interactions across the entire patient journey. NetSuite also makes it possible for healthcare system users to tap into back-office data that influences patient interactions, from how a patient prefers to pay their bills to which facilities have flu vaccines in stock. NetSuite’s ERP-integrated CRM also makes it easy to track the return on investment of marketing and other forms of outreach and easily share those results with any authorized CRM user, helping ensure that future campaigns will be more likely to achieve their goals.

Adopting CRM software lets healthcare organizations understand who patients are, what they need, and how they prefer to engage with the healthcare provider to meet those needs. These insights are available at both the individual level, allowing for highly targeted interactions, and the system-wide level, allowing for data-driven decision-making about business priorities, such as marketing outreach and service delivery. CRM in healthcare enables organizations to take a more personalized approach to serving their patients—an approach that can build trust and improve loyalty for many years to come.

CRM in Healthcare FAQs

Is an EMR a CRM?

Electronic medical records (EMRs) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems serve different purposes in healthcare organizations. EMRs store and manage clinical data, such as patient medical charts, while CRMs handle business operations, such as patient outreach, appointment scheduling, and service coordination. Although both systems may contain patient information, they focus on different aspects of healthcare delivery.

Do hospitals use CRM systems?

Healthcare organizations implement customer relationship management (CRM) systems to fine-tune patient engagement and improve operational efficiency. These systems help hospitals coordinate patient communications, track patient interactions across multiple channels, and analyze patient satisfaction data. By centralizing patient-interaction data, healthcare CRMs enable more personalized care delivery, while also supporting a healthcare organization’s strategic growth initiatives.

What is considered a CRM system?

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems centralize customer data and interactions in a single database to improve business relationships. Core CRM capabilities typically include contact management, sales tracking, marketing automation, and customer service tools. The system allows teams throughout an organization to access real-time customer information, track interactions, and identify opportunities to enhance service delivery.

Does a CRM need to be HIPAA-compliant?

Healthcare organizations that handle protected health information (PHI) must use a CRM system that complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Other businesses need not comply with HIPAA if they don’t handle PHI. HIPAA compliance requirements include data encryption, access controls, audit trails, and secure data storage. Healthcare providers should verify that their CRM solution meets all HIPAA security and privacy standards before implementation.