Anticlue

Patient Relationship Management

One of the key complaints in healthcare is the lack of a personal relationship between the patient and the organization. A patient relationship management system, PRM, may have real benefits here.

In healthcare, approximately 80 percent of business comes from patients who have previously utilized the healthcare system. A Patient Relationship Management Application can help to provide safe, timely, patient centered, efficient care by focusing on chronic disease management through a multidisciplinary team with ongoing assessments and follow-ups.

The key is to identify the patients who would be willing for such notifications, probably best via a written permission. Since you are focusing on repeat customers, have an additional form requesting if the patient would like to be included in such a system, and the preferred communication channel.

What does a PRM do? A PRM captures patient information to support the patient throughout their plan of care. The system signals timely messages between the patients and the care team. This can either be between the patient and team such as referral documentation, or between team members as in medical alerts for a chronic condition. The benefit to the patient is that the PRM identifies may include earlier disease discovery and better disease management overall, in addition to improved communications. For the healthcare organization, a PRM provides a valuable marketing tool through predictive modeling. These tools vary from determining service line market share to patient market share comparisons by year to tracking physician referrals.

A nice white paper on the subject can be found here.