HCRM: Revolutionizing Healthcare with Hospital Customer Relationship Management
With the continuous development of China’s healthcare sector, the overall medical market in China is no longer satisfied with a disease-centric model focused solely on “treatment and being treated.” To provide comprehensive services to patients and their families, some hospitals have begun implementing Hospital Customer Relationship Management (HCRM) systems.
What is HCRM?
HCRM, short for Hospital Customer Relationship Management, also known as hospital customer relationship management, isRefers to a new market-oriented, customer-centric service model established by hospitals through the application of information technology to optimize internal service processes.
What Can HCRM Do?
HCRM functions as a comprehensive patient-provider service system, integrating enterprise CRM management expertise and service philosophies into hospital operations to establish an integrated framework. Its functionalities can be broadly categorized as follows:
Establish a Customer Information Database:Patient name, gender, age, education level, occupation, family circumstances, preferred hospital types, and specialized departments. By integrating and entering basic information collected during front-desk registration, patient data obtained during departmental consultations, and medical consultation records, a comprehensive patient information database can be established. Through this database, hospitals can query data such as patients’ allergy history, genetic disease history, and specific medical information needs, and export these records as needed. This facilitates the implementation of more personalized and targeted medical interventions.
Establish a Hospital Information Database:Patients can browse information related to hospitals, specialists, consultation schedules, and appointment registration via online platforms or hospital terminal devices. After receiving a prescription, patients can query online for details such as drug categories, drug names, properties, indications and functions, side effects, and prices.
Smart Appointment:Patients can access specialist consultation schedules through the hospital’s information database to make targeted appointment registrations. Upon arrival at the hospital, patients can verify their identity via self-service kiosks and print their registration slips, thereby avoiding long queues for number issuance. In the event of an inability to attend the appointment, patients can cancel their registration in just a few simple steps.
Call Center Intelligent Services:The call center serves as the primary channel for communication between hospitals and patients, and represents the functional module with the highest level of computer-telephony integration (CTI). It supports features such as faxing, email, call recording and monitoring, outbound dialing, system administration, and caller identification.
Complaints and Suggestions:HCRM can collect customer feedback through multiple channels (call centers, suggestion boxes, letters, in-person visits, the Internet, email, and SMS). Dedicated customer service personnel will organize and enter the feedback into the system, forwarding it to hospital management for handling. Meanwhile, customer service staff will also provide updates to patients, enabling them to stay informed about the progress of issue resolution in a timely manner.
VIP Client Management:For hospitals, VIP clients refer to patients with chronic diseases requiring long-term treatment and care. Hospitals can identify VIP clients through their customer information database and develop more personalized treatment plans for them. To maintain customer loyalty, hospitals also implement measures such as patient satisfaction surveys, priority appointment scheduling, and discounted medication prices.
Community Health Information Services:HCRM can extend hospital services to the entire community, providing residents with multiple channels for inquiries, promoting health and wellness knowledge, establishing community health records, and delivering care services.
Disease Progression Tracking and Management:HCRM also provides comprehensive care for patients undergoing post-discharge rehabilitation. The hospital continuously monitors the patient’s condition throughout the rehabilitation process and offers progressive recommendations to facilitate recovery, while automatically sending timely reminders for medication adherence, follow-up visits, and prescription refills.
Email Marketing:With patient consent, HCRM will send emails to patients containing updates on the hospital’s new medical research achievements, healthcare information, and value-added health services. This establishes a “prospect–customer–loyal customer–lifetime customer” pipeline, thereby enhancing the hospital’s market competitiveness.
Client Health Analysis:Based on the information data collected from the customer database, HCRM automatically categorizes customers according to specific criteria. It then performs intelligent health inference, diagnosis, early warning reporting, and loyalty analysis based on the constitutional characteristics of each category, providing hospitals with comprehensive decision-making analytics to support hospital operations to a certain extent.
Benefits of HCRM?
1. Rapidly process and analyze patient information to provide intelligent decision support;
2. Enhance effective communication between the hospital and its clients to provide better services;
3. The trend toward digitalization reduces hospital operating costs;
4. Enhance the intelligence of hospital management information systems;
5. Enhance the hospital's long-term economic benefits;
6. Leverage customer resources to establish long-term trust between the hospital and patients, thereby enhancing the hospital's market competitiveness.
How to Build an HCRM?
I. Standardize the customer resource management process, clarify the hospital’s service targets and scope, identify target customer segments and markets, and provide personalized service offerings.
II. Optimize internal hospital processes, enhance the quality of medical services, and expand the scope of care to include areas such as healthcare maintenance, health consultation, disease prevention and control, and psychological support, thereby improving patient satisfaction.
Text | Zhou Yanxun Editor | Mo Renying