This is the final post in a series of four that discuss why hospitals and health systems must look beyond the Electronic Health Record (EHR) in order to cultivate richer patient engagement and boost patient loyalty, and how a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways.

Read our first post that defines patient engagement and explains why it’s so important in fostering trust between a patient and his or her healthcare system. Our second post discusses why health systems need more than just an EHR to successfully engage their patients. The third post discusses how a CRM system can bridge the patient engagement gap.

Optimize the Monies Spent on Your EHR

Has your EHR system influenced your patients’ behavior in order to change their healthcare decisions? Can you measure the return on investment (ROI) that your EHR system has delivered? Can your EHR proactively drive patient engagement in a bi-directional conversation? Can your EHR educate and target any given patient on how he or she can proactively manage his or her health? More

This is the third post in a series of four that discuss why hospitals and health systems must look beyond the Electronic Health Record (EHR) in order to cultivate richer patient engagement and boost patient loyalty, and how a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways.

Read our first post that defines patient engagement and explains why it’s so important in fostering trust between a patient and his or her healthcare system. Our second post discusses why health systems need more than just an EHR to successfully engage their patients, and the fourth post shares how a CRM, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways.

CRM systems have been in use for at least 30 years in other industries. In fact, more than half of users adopted a CRM within their company’s first five years in business, and two-thirds of companies had at least 100 customers when they first purchased a CRM. In 2015, worldwide CRM software totaled $26.3 billion, up 12.3 percent from $23.4 billion in 2014.

Until recently, healthcare organizations have been slow to adopt CRM systems for a variety of reasons, one of which is that they have been focused on and committed to EHR implementations.

A CRM solution is used by hospitals and health systems to create richer engagement and build deeper relationships with current and prospective patients. More

This is the second post in a series of four that discuss why hospitals and health systems must look beyond the Electronic Health Record (EHR) in order to cultivate richer patient engagement and boost patient loyalty, and how a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways. 

Read our first post that defines patient engagement and explains why it’s so important in fostering trust between a patient and his or her healthcare system. The third post discusses how a CRM system can bridge the patient engagement gap, and the fourth post shares how a CRM, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways.

Why Is Patient Engagement Important?

Engagement of customers is not a new concept. Other industries have been focused on “consumer engagement” for years as a way to achieve long-term financial success. Banks, retailers, and other consumer-oriented organizations have long realized that customer loyalty is due, in large part, to frequent meaningful engagement.

To that end, these organizations engage their customers with relevant content, such as education, infotainment, and other forms of communication, that keeps those customers actively involved with their organization; the goal is to understand what information specific customers would want to know more about, or what advice they might need at certain stages of their buying journey, all in the hopes that these customers keep coming back.

Knowing that it costs 5x as much to acquire a new customer than to keep one, these organizations make keeping customers interested, informed, and engaged a high priority. More

This is the first post in a series of four that discuss why hospitals and health systems must look beyond the Electronic Health Record (EHR) in order to cultivate richer patient engagement and boost patient loyalty, and how a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways.

Read the second post to learn why health systems need more than just an EHR to successfully engage their patients. The third post discusses how a CRM system can bridge the patient engagement gap, and the fourth post shares how a CRM, when integrated with your EHR system, can help you interact and engage with your patients in more meaningful ways.

Changing healthcare market forces, such as value-based care models, consolidation, and payer mix erosion, have propagated declining margins and fueled hyper-competition among hospitals and health systems. In this new world, determining effective patient engagement strategies has become paramount for healthcare organizations as they strive to acquire, retain, and re-activate patients, and, ultimately, drive revenue. Now, more than ever, it is critical that hospitals and health systems create and maintain positive, lasting relationships with their patients, both current and prospective, working to attract them into their network and keep them there.

Many healthcare executives initially looked to their Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and patient portals, mandated by the Affordable Care Act, to help them engage patients, but are now realizing that these technologies are not the complete solution. But, if they’re not, then what is? Enter Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, relationship-based technologies designed to deepen patient relationships across the care continuum and enhance patient loyalty. More