360 Degrees of Healthcare

Healthcare professionals lack a complete view of the patient’s health record and are constantly switching from one system to another to find the information they need. When healthcare professionals spend time toggling between screens, they spend less time interacting with patients.

Healthcare professionals want a system that surfaces critical data and makes it actionable. With a connected integration layer, the CRM helps providers break down barriers between disparate systems and software applications to share information across a range of sources, including hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, billing, and marketing. Through HL7 and FHIR standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs), a CRM pulls data from various systems to create a single view of the patient, which improves service, collaboration, and operational efficiencies.

Providers can also add new capabilities to the core CRM platform with minimal IT effort using extensible clinical data models.

• Personalized communications: Integrate EHRs and other systems of record to identify, segment, and deliver personalized communications to patients on their preferred channels. Patients can also take control of their experience with HIPAA-compliant self-service portals.
• Care coordination: Simplify collaboration among the care team with a consolidated, real-time view of patient records to give providers access to important clinical and nonclinical insights that can improve operational efficiencies.
• Risk stratification: With predictive analytics, providers can identify and predict which patients are at high risk for disease and proactively manage those patients with appropriate care-management programs.

Interactions with the healthcare system often occur at the most vulnerable times for patients. Providers must have access to comprehensive medical records to deliver the most effective, individualized treatment at those critical moments.

An integrated CRM platform consolidates all clinical and nonclinical patient information from existing systems into a single console. The rich, contextual view surfaces conditions and medications, appointment history, wearable device data, communication preferences, and social determinants of health, such as employment, finances, housing, and transportation.

With this level of visibility, healthcare professionals can deliver personalized experiences everywhere — when an agent is handling a patient inquiry or when a doctor is discussing a care plan with a patient during an appointment. This deepens the patient-provider relationship, builds trust, and powers care decisions that translate to better health outcomes.

Healthcare providers are awash with data thanks to years of heavy investment in EHR systems. Until now, it’s been unclear how to make sense of it all. An integrated CRM could be the answer. By embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into a CRM platform, providers can extract data from disparate systems and turn insight into action.

Within the CRM platform, data can be segmented by population to create personalized, contextualized engagement. AI can suggest the next best actions for call center staff to arrange transportation for patients at risk of missing their appointment or alert a care manager of patients falling behind on their care plan and recommend personalized outreach. Providers can assess the effects of such efforts and iterate future communications.

AI can be applied to achieve a multitude of other benefits, too:

• Surface appropriate training resources for staff education.
• Help healthcare professionals anticipate issues based on patient history.
• Guide call center agents to the right response to a patient inquiry with next-best action recommendations.

Collaboration among the care team is key to delivering an improved patient experience, but often data is tucked away in siloed systems, prohibiting an up-to-date patient view.

With an integrated CRM platform, users on the care team can access the latest patient information and see upcoming tasks. For example, if a patient has a complicated question and the primary doctor is unavailable, another doctor or nurse in the practice can advise without delay because of updated information in the console. If there’s a next step, like a follow-up blood test, information about the test and lab location can be automatically sent to patients on their preferred channel of communication.

And if the system detects that the patient lacks access to transportation — captured as part of their social determinants of health — the provider is alerted and can help the patient arrange a ride to avoid missing the appointment.

These are the types of seamless patient experiences that encourage better adherence to care pathways and ultimately influence better health outcomes.

Patients prefer different modes of communication. Some might like text, email, or webchat, while others want to pick up the phone or receive information through the mail.

A CRM platform can capture these preferences, so providers are always engaging patients when and how they want to be contacted. Proactively sending messages to patients about upcoming appointments, lab results, and wellness- and disease-management programs can help improve patient satisfaction, promote care plan participation, and reduce costs. Patient journeys can even be automated so that organ recipients or hip-replacement patients receive relevant communications at the right point along their health journey to recovery for greater engagement and adherence.

To take a member-centric approach, payers must shift from being reactionary to being predictive and proactive in the member journey.

An integrated CRM platform provides payers with a 360-degree view of the member. This enables teams to collaborate in real time, prioritize actions, and engage members proactively. Everyone involved in the member journey can engage on the platform to easily resolve questions regarding plan details, coverage, and costs.

Payers can also schedule personalized member communications that encourage healthy behaviors, sending reminders about things like preventative care and other benefits. With artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in the platform, payers can also identify high-risk members and recommend next best actions to care coordinators for more timely intervention and greater member engagement.

With a single view of the member and personalized service at scale, payers can boost member satisfaction, making them more likely making them more likely to recommend and renew their plan

Members can get frustrated when they reach out to customer service agents about physician networks, benefits, or out-of-pocket costs, and need to repeat their situation multiple times. Waiting for colleagues or piecing together information from different systems to compile a member-specific response disrupts the ability to effectively solve members’ problems.

An integrated CRM platform can give call center agents a 360-degree view of every member as soon as they reach out. Agents quickly access medical history, provider details, plan information, communication history, preferences, claims, and benefits. This optimizes workflows, shortens call length, and improves first-call resolution for greater member trust.

Decision-making is even more personalized with AI. When a member reaches out, agents know the person’s name and health history and can anticipate the members’ needs to determine the next best action for faster, smarter, and connected service.

Current operations may involve time-consuming manual processes, like collecting member information from multiple systems, sending it to a printer, and mailing it out. Switching between systems and waiting for the completion of each subsequent task can lead to slowdowns at a time when members are expecting fast, personalized communication.

A CRM can reduce inefficiencies and free up agents to focus on more valuable tasks. Salesforce’s CRM platform complies with HIPAA and other industry regulations to:

• Connect disparate systems of record
• Automate workflows and filter urgent tasks to those best equipped to handle them
• Build on a secure platform that has global compliance and certifications
• Streamline and automate engagement throughout the member journey

The ability to segment specific member populations is vital for payers in managing high-risk members or targeting those identified as not engaged in wellness- or disease-management plans.

An integrated CRM platform can help you be proactive in the member journey. For example, easily identify and reach out to at-risk populations with tailored content to help them better manage chronic conditions (for example, diabetes), or send a communication to all men over age 50 reminding them to schedule a prostate examination. The platform makes it easy to monitor the results of outreach by measuring engagement and action and to refine health intervention strategies for more effective campaigns.

All members have their own communication preferences. As such, payers must offer a variety of channels — including phone, live chat, email, mobile apps, text, web, and online forums — and ensure that these channels are working well together.

An integrated CRM platform engages members through their communication channel of choice to share useful and timely information, including advice, tips, and apps developed to meet their unique health needs and preferences. When members have an issue and reach out for help, agents can respond on the same channel and make the most of their complete view to provide the requested information and resolve a member’s concerns quickly and efficiently.

For too long, pharmaceutical companies have relied on disparate internal systems. With these costly and aging systems, pharmaceutical companies are unable to obtain a complete view of customer and patient information. This hinders their ability to innovate and develop meaningful relationships.

To solve this, an integrated CRM platform connects to existing technology systems, via application programming interfaces (APIs), to unify provider, patient, and partner information. Everyone gets a single view on a common platform, reducing complexities and inefficiencies while increasing the pace of possible innovation.

As a result, the CRM platform becomes a source of truth, helping to drive awareness and support with providers while also tracking marketing and sales performance with built-in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Access to this valuable information powers increased loyalty, prescribing habits, and a model for patient engagement at scale.

More data is created than ever before, but insights are what drive business forward. From accelerating drug discovery and optimizing clinical trials to improving sales performance and helping patients achieve expected outcomes, AI can surface data insights that enable the following scenarios:

• Predict outcomes, recommend next best actions, and automate workflows
• Predict which patients are most likely to stop adhering to medication regimes and suggest best methods for intervention
• Apply predictive analytics to identify and recruit candidates for clinical trials
• Deliver personalized engagement and support programs to reduce operational costs while helping patients manage their disease and navigate their health journey
• Receive predictive recommendations to improve support programs and gain better access to real-world data to achieve targeted patient outcomes.
• Gain valuable and immediate insight into vast amounts of data so sales teams can better target physicians
• Pull in competitor data to help sales reps better compete in the market

Pharmaceutical companies are greatly impacted by the consolidation of larger health systems. Decisions on drug utilization are now made in a centralized manner with restricted access. As a result, pharmaceutical companies need an omni-channel strategy to reach distributors and providers with the right message at the right time on the right channel.

A CRM platform connects everything from engagement with clinical trials to interactions with providers (through sales or medical affairs) to patients via care programs. The data generated drives awareness and support of providers while also tracking marketing and sales performance to boost business with built-in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

With an omni-channel solution, pharmaceutical companies can deploy relevant communications, answer customer questions, and address concerns all on preferred channels.

AI can scale personalized communications, ensuring providers get relevant information when they need it the most.

Patients expect access to information about, and support for, their medications with a similar level of service they get from brands in other areas of their lives. Yet very few pharmaceutical companies engage with patients directly.

A CRM platform helps pharmaceutical companies deliver personalized engagement and support programs so patients can manage their conditions and navigate the health journey. Companies can use the CRM platform to:

• Scale therapeutic-specific programs: The single platform lowers the operational costs of maintaining patient services and programs across brands and therapeutic areas.
• Create connected, personalized experiences: Service agents can connect directly with patients to coordinate onboarding, insurance verification, and copay programs, and deliver ongoing support to improve program adherence, all from a single view.
• Track program performance: With built-in analytics and AI, you can improve support programs with predictive recommendations and gain access to real-world data to achieve better patient outcomes.

Pharmaceutical companies can also leverage a patient portal, which acts as a scalable information center. When it comes to onboarding for new therapies, it’s a shared point of contact that reduces the administrative burdens of onboarding. The portal increases visibility and transparency in the journey and status, reduces onboarding cycle times, and improves adherence.

The bottom line: An integrated CRM makes it possible to personalize patient engagement at scale, improve programs, and encourage adherence to therapy.

The industry is seeing rising costs for clinical trials — more trial sites are required due to challenges in patient recruitment and retainment while fewer patients are randomized at late-stage, large-scale phases of studies. This results in the biggest expense of all: lost time and market opportunity.

Counter this by connecting trial teams, patients, and clinical data on a single digital platform. An integrated CRM platform can address every phase of development, from study start-up to trial management to product release, putting innovation on the fast track, enabling companies to:

• Recruit easily: With communication and interaction capabilities layered into the CRM platform, recruit and enroll patients easily with tools that quantify and evaluate patient suitability.
• Foster collaboration: During every phase of clinical development, a patient portal and associated apps serve as a centralized place to share information and collaborate securely.
• Get real-time reporting: Operational reporting dashboards give updates on enrollment and drop-offs, while predictive analytics can determine the next best steps to take.
• Establish efficient workflows: Create better workflows and obtain faster approval for therapies by integrating data from multiple systems.

The connected platform eliminates obstacles to the flow of information, speeds up the launch of trial sites and patient enrollment, and helps ensure a trial’s success.

The medical device service model is changing as a greater number of providers are restricting access to reps and providers are consolidating into large health systems. To get ahead in today’s fast-moving, competitive device market, medical device companies must have a better view of customers — provider systems, operations teams, distributors, internal sales and marketing teams, and patients — to better understand their needs and deliver proactive engagement and service.

An integrated CRM platform provides a complete view of each customer. From a single platform, your teams can further innovate and improve the customer experience:

• Sales teams anticipate customer needs and respond in a more timely and personalized manner with access to service history, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities fuel insights based on the customer profile
• Marketing teams deliver the right message at the right point in the customer lifecycle

Customer-facing teams can also share information with commercial groups. Likewise, commercial groups can share information with R&D, passing along valuable feedback such as product and feature requests. The CRM platform acts as a knowledge-sharing center, allowing reps to tap into this information to prime customers for what’s coming down the pike.

Many medical device companies rely on multiple technology systems that weren’t designed with customer engagement in mind or the ability to work with each other. Standardization on a smaller set of platforms that are extensible, configurable, easy to manage, future-proof, and integrate with existing data and homegrown systems is a must.

An integrated CRM solution alleviates the burden of multiple systems and consolidates technology by layering on top of existing solutions. The CRM platform connects all points in the customer lifecycle — clinical, manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, sales, and service. With a single view, organizations can glean actionable insights into all business interactions and maintain connections across commercial, patient services, and clinical trials to deliver a consistent experience from the health system to the provider to the patient.

The platform accelerates business, encourages collaboration, and empowers developers. Medical device companies can also build on top of the platform with new features, such as apps for internal employees or customer service. This allows them to:

• Leverage out-of-the-box enterprise services: Drag-and-drop tools make it easy for anyone on your team to build apps without ever having to write code.
• Focus on innovation: Developers stay focused on high-value initiatives with available operations and tools.
• Ensure governance and compliance: Out-of-the-box functionalities like integration and identity services guarantee app development follows proper protocol.

Whether responding to a doctor in an operating room or a patient just beginning a journey with a heart rate monitor, medical device companies need to act on critical micro-moments with speed and scale. With an integrated CRM, reps are able to access valuable and actionable data and insights from one platform to best serve customers in a connected, intelligent manner.

To do this, the first step is to aggregate data. The CRM platform pulls in data sources across the ecosystem so everyone has a line of sight into:

• Real-time sales to inform production and anticipate needs across sales, marketing, and service.
• R&D processes that may affect manufacturing, quality assurance, business development, and licensing.
• Device performance.
• Patient and clinician feedback to evolve devices and services.

Artificial intelligence (AI) embedded into the platform analyzes and learns from this data — which includes leads, contacts, and other opportunities — to uncover business insights, predict outcomes, recommend next best actions, and automate workflows. From a single console, predictions show up for sales, customer service, or marketing, helping to deliver smarter interactions that meet customer needs.

In the fast-moving medical device market, reps are pressed to meet rising customer expectations as quickly and efficiently as possible.

With a CRM platform that integrates disparate sales systems and applications to achieve a 360-degree view of each customer, reps gain deeper insight into areas where sales are succeeding, areas of improvement, and the necessary steps to proactively build relationships and grow business. And because AI is embedded into the CRM platform, reps sell even smarter. AI can predict sales behavior, project growth, and identify opportunities. This includes:

• Account management and forecasting: Access each customer’s detailed account history for accurate forecasting along with recommended next best actions. AI can prioritize sales activities and the tools to spot new opportunities and close deals faster.
• Sales reporting: Increase reach and frequency of selling activities, improve account and territory performance, and assess effectiveness based on insights from flexible dashboards that leverage CRM data analytics.
• Collaboration: Leverage the single view for greater collaboration and communication by connecting sales teams with your partners.
• Territory management: Combine forecast and industry data for a real-time view.
• Training: Train new reps through a centralized location for sales and enablement.

An integrated CRM platform speeds up the purchase cycle, helping reps stay close to current customers while prospecting new ones. With personalized outreach and proactive selling, you can build customer trust and encourage their mastery of the device.

Device data can play a big role in improving patient engagement throughout the care journey.

An integrated CRM securely captures patient information and enables direct communication. For example, patients can request data from their doctors as well as directly from the medical device company to stay better informed about their health and actively involved in care decisions. Patients can also access product details and device data on companion mobile apps and community portals, connecting with other people with similar health conditions. This creates one-to-one personalized experiences at every touchpoint.

You can also nurture prospective patients by following up and guiding them to the right products. The CRM platform also captures contact information and communication preferences to keep everyone up to date on new products and solutions.