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Healthcare CRM vs. Patient Relationship Management Software (PRM)

Disclaimer: Virgin Pulse and HealthComp are now Personify Health

Today’s healthcare marketers are under a growing amount of pressure to recoup patient volumes, protect and grow market share, and drive revenue. What’s more, the traditional ways that worked before COVID-19 aren’t necessarily working, making it very clear that successfully marketing healthcare services today requires more advanced tools and methods than in the past.

The application of physician relationship management software has emerged as a key differentiator in the healthcare sector. The use of medical PRM software coupled with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) could be the potential game-changer in the healthcare industry.

Provider relationship management coupled with strategic plans changing, and morphing, serve as two mission critical tools you need to strategically fuel top-line growth and manage bottom-line risk. The integration of healthcare PRM and CRM into your strategy is vital as we traverse these turbulent times. When evaluating CRM and Physician relationship management vendors, it’s important to know that not all software is created equal, and how to find the right one for your specific needs.

Simultaneously, the emergence of healthcare relationship management marks a new era in how patient data is leveraged for better results. Understanding what CRM stands for in healthcare could open avenues for more advanced healthcare management methodologies.

The right PRM and CRM for healthcare will provide the deep market insights necessary for you to acquire and retain high-value patients, reinforce provider relationships to maximize referrals and minimize revenue loss, and include reporting tools to differentiate between CRM vs PRM and help you prove campaign ROI.

Keep reading for more info on CRM and PRM solutions and what organizations in the healthcare industry should look for when investing in these tools.

What is a healthcare marketing CRM solution?

CRM stands for customer relationship management and in healthcare it’s a critical piece of your marketing toolkit. A CRM is typically used to track customer and prospect information, leads, engagements and lifecyles. In healthcare, a CRM allows you to effectively understand and analyze current patients, as well as acquire and retain new high-value prospects.

A good healthcare CRM allows you to:

  • Leverage data for precise targeting and insight on the population most in need of services
  • Use marketing automation to increase service line growth
  • Reach patients with personalized creative and content tailored directly to them via the communication channels they prefer
  • Invite them in for appointments with goals of converting them to patients
  • And most importantly track the downstream revenue from those encounters and link it back to the campaigns that reached them to prove your value (closed-loop ROI).

Go beyond traditional CRM with a CRM software specifically built for healthcare

Only Personify Health takes you beyond traditional CRM to help you understand what makes your consumers and patients unique. The base of our “secret sauce” is consumer data and healthcare analytics that leverage Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), which are critical for understanding what puts a person at risk or in need of your services.

SDOH factors include environmental, financial and social factors that make up to 70% of a person’s health status. Typical marketing target lists are built on clinical and claims data alone, which make up about 30% of a person’s health. Leaving out SDOH data when you’re creating targeting lists limits efficacy because these insights are based on limited historical and often outdated insights.

Personify Health helps tap into SDOH insights by combining a client’s existing (clinical and claims) data with our robust consumer database. We take protection of this data seriously and are HIPAA compliant and maintain HITRUST certification. 

Target based on intent and likelihood to respond, not just risk

Applying predictive analytics to this combined dataset, means Personify Health can identify with up to 90% accuracy, not only who is at risk or in need of a service, but also whether they will be receptive to messages and likely to take action based on outreach. With this level of insight, healthcare organizations can more effectively develop and execute campaigns to acquire new patients, retain existing high-value patients, boost overall patient engagement and more.

And don’t forget about conducting the actual outreach. A good health CRM like the one Personify Healthoffers will include the ability to conduct multi-channel, multi-cycle outreach on your behalf, as well as include closed-loop reporting tools to give you the insights you need to prove to leadership the impact your work is having. Add in Personify Health’s unparalleled support team and you’ve got a recipe for strategic growth success!

What is a healthcare PRM solution?

n healthcare, PRM stands for physician relationship management (or provider relationship management) and is designed to help you manage physician networks so you can build stronger relationships and grow referrals within your system.

A good PRM for healthcare allows you to:

  • Integrate healthcare analytics, like claims data, electronic medical record (EMR) encounter data and physician liaison data
  • Understand where physicians have workload in the market
  • Identify potential sources of leakage
  • Determine which PCPs have relationships with your specialists
  • Analyze physician utilization and patient referrals
  • Measure the impact of outreach
  • Be flexible to support future physician network growth initiatives

For physician liaisons, by physician liaisons

Personify Health’s PRM solution, Physicianology, was built for physician liaisons, by physician liaisons, who know exactly how complex your role is. Physicianology is the only physician relations management tool that integrates comprehensive physician market and utilization data with contact management and communication tools so you can measure, analyze and strategically engage physicians all in one place.

No matter what your physician recruitment strategies are, we make it easier for you to identify and engage the physicians who deliver the most value while discovering new service line growth opportunities and minimizing referral leakage. And, with closed loop data, you’ll also get visibility into the impact of your outreach – like which splitters are shifting habits and sending more of their patients to your system.

What are the differences between a CRM and PRM?

This is important because often a CRM or PRM vendor will position itself as a solution for both business needs, when truthfully they serve related but independent purposes.

Remember that a CRM is best for targeting patients and prospects, creating a customer experience that’s tailored to what data is telling you they need and will respond to. A PRM is a tool for identifying and guiding outreach to referring providers and practices, so you can keep relationships strong and retain and increase referrals to your system.

Why do you need both CRM and PRM?

Personify Health’s CRM and PRM solutions go beyond traditional tactics to power your strategic growth no matter where you are on the journey from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement. Only Personify Health gives you the full spectrum of CRM and PRM software, content and services to manage your entire market in one solution and give you clear line of sight into ROI and value.