It goes without saying that in order to maintain financial viability, healthcare organizations must maintain patient loyalty. There are vast marketing engines in place to capture patient loyalty through the use of portals and other collaborative tools. However, when you take a look at the numbers, such as those published frequently by Gallup, you see that patients are drawn to a healthcare organization on account of the high-quality physicians that compose their ranks. As such, loyal physicians will bring loyal patients, making loyalty among affiliated physicians a necessary component of financial effectiveness. Traditional strategies for maintaining loyalty of affiliated physician populations include operational tactics, such as making sure physicians have the tools and administrative support they need to provide care effectively. However, a well functioning hospital administration, while vital to any hospital, will not impact physician loyalty in the long term. How does a hospital achieve long term physician loyalty to achieve financial goals?
Many healthcare systems find themselves in an increasingly competitive environment where the pressure of reducing reimbursements, aligning more effectively with affiliated physicians and being relevant to the patient population are just a few of the challenges being faced. In addition, the advent of healthcare reform, the potential changing reimbursement models and the emerging Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) are creating an environment where clinical and cost information are needed to empower and engage those that are part of your overall healthcare system delivery model.
Customer Relationship Management and Physician Loyalty
Customer relationship management (CRM) for healthcare providers has particularly interesting applications in light of healthcare reform. CRM is defined as a managerial strategy that helps organizations collect, analyze, and manage customer related information through the use of information technology tools and techniques in order to satisfy customer needs and establish a long term and mutually beneficial relationship. The rapid increase in medical information has pushed hospitals to confront a critical issue, which is how to utilize information technologies to manage large amounts of customer information and then improve the quality of customer services based on that intelligence. The definition of “customer” within the healthcare provider space is multi-directional, and physicians are a key consideration.
By using CRM, healthcare providers can collect information about affiliated physicians and analyze that information to inform relevant communication that is provided to physicians at the right time. CRM and data mining tools also enable healthcare providers to define the variables of the most highly-prized physicians in their internal ranks and match those variable to physicians outside their practice that are prime for recruiting. All physician communications can be tracked and adjustments can be made to the program as necessary.
Do you have questions about CRM and physician loyalty? Join Perficient and Oracle on April 28th for a free webinar Healthcare Reform and Physician Loyalty, which includes a live demonstration to see how other healthcare providers leverage Oracle’s CRM On Demand to increase efficiencies and physician alignment. Topics include:
- Empower Patients and Physicians: Identify and connect high-risk patients with the appropriate physicians and healthcare services that you deliver.
- Physician Referrals: Automate, simplify and manage all the information your referral process needs with one comprehensive set of tools.
- Service: Build and retain customer satisfaction by resolving issues efficiently, thanks to consistent access to up-to-date information from across your organization.
- Integration: Focus high-value resources on your business, not your IT infrastructure, thanks to the only CRM solution that provides Web Services support as well as prebuilt integration to Oracle and other business applications.
- Analytics: Make informed decisions based on deep insight into your business, thanks to the only on-demand CRM solution with a pre-built data warehouse that allows you to combine real-time intelligence with deep historical and comparative trend analysis.
- Call Center: Make your agents more productive and your physicians and patients happier and more loyal with the only hosted multichannel support application that can be deployed in days, not months- without upfront capital expenditures or integration costs.
- Marketing: Transform the way you market to physicians and patients with an integrated solution that makes your team work more efficiently, more effectively and with greater accountability.
