As ARSA expanded, ensuring a consistent, measurable, and productive patient journey became a significant strategic challenge. This issue resulted in difficulties optimizing patient outcomes while simultaneously maintaining the scale and profitability of the practice.

It was challenging for MFP to grow their practice without gaining transparency into both marketing & operations. MFP also found it difficult to get access to the data and information they wanted while using multiple vendors in conjunction with their practice management and EMR solution, Modernizing Medicine.

Numerous challenges arise when keeping patients informed about their recommended treatment plan for recurring procedures. Ideally, patients would leave their appointment with their next appointment booked. However, for a number of reasons, many patients are not comfortable booking 90 days out.

It was challenging for Bonmente to gather patient experience insights across their patients, by provider and appointment type, due to the volume of patients and nature of the specialty care they provide.

Managing a multi-specialty ophthalmology practice is a challenging task that requires the right technologies, partners and data. Ophthalmology is ultra-competitive when it comes to generating leads and patients, which means every dollar spent needs to be managed as efficiently and effectively as possible.

It was challenging for Suncoast Skin Solutions to grow their business without gaining transparency into both marketing & operations. SKS also found it difficult to get access to the data and information they wanted while using multiple vendors in conjunction with their practice management and EMR solution, Modernizing Medicine.

It was challenging for MFP to grow their practice without gaining transparency into both marketing & operations. MFP also found it difficult to get access to the data and information they wanted while using multiple vendors in conjunction with their practice management and EMR solution, Modernizing Medicine.

Maintaining successful relationships with patients can be done by managing successful workflows in your CRM platform. Mapping out workflows and communication needs will help you and your staff provide the best patient care outside of the care they receive from your medical providers. Here’s how to get started.

Phase One – Set Actionable Goals

Define specific goals for each department from your marketing team, to your patient schedulers to your practice administrators. Everyone knows that the end game is to give every patient the best experience, but having specific goals based on their roles in the practice help each individual understand what they are responsible for and how they add value to the patient’s journey.

Phase Two – Evaluate Manual Work

For each department in the practice, identify any work that is repetitive, time-consuming, or overlaps with another team. These are the manual processes that should be automated with workflows in your CRM. Anything that is done the same way every time or requires a team member to do or check on something can all be set up to execute based on logic triggers. 

Phase Three – Consult Your Staff 

No one knows what the pain points and inefficiencies are better than the people doing that job every day. When you’re onboarding your teams to the CRM, make sure you include them for input. While a practice manager or account manager at the CRM company may be able to provide some helpful best practices to get you started, your individual staff members are going to be the ones actually using the software. Thus, it is important to get their feedback on the intimate details of what their roadblocks are from being as effective as possible.

Phase Four – Implement, Test, Adjust

Once your workflows are set up, it’s time to evaluate. Take note of what your current KPI stats are for each team. After you’ve been running for a while, evaluate if those KPIs have improved and if you are hitting your goals for each team. If you’re not, review ways that the workflows can be adjusted to help the team reach their goal numbers for the week, month, quarter, and year. 

Workflows should be fluid and should be reviewed frequently to maintain alignment between the team goals, practice growth, and standards for patient care. The most successful medical practices review their workflows anytime there is growth in the practice (i.e, a new procedure, provider, or location is added), staff turn over (i.e., workflows should be part of all new employee onboardings), changes in the industry (i.e., the rise of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of practices all over the world re-evaluating workflows around virtual appointments.)

A good CRM focuses on one thing – your patient. This means that the CRM you chose for your practice needs to offer a selection of workflow automation tools, contact management solutions, activity management tools, and analytics for marketing and ROI. These tools will help your staff and your brand form a strong bond and loyalty with your patients.

In today’s market, there are many different CRM companies that offer these tools to medical practices. Thus, it can be difficult to decide which one to choose for your practice. At the end of the day, what matters most is to pick the CRM that fits your internal workflows and can help your staff work smarter, faster, and stronger. Decrease opportunity cost by automating marketing efforts to new and existing patients, reduce staff workload and provide transparent tracking and analytics to help make better business decisions.

What Are Workflows in a CRM?

A workflow is a series of actions leading up to an end goal in a business process. In a medical practice CRM, goals can be to book a procedure, respond to and correct and bad review, or launch a marketing campaign. Workflows are meant to assist the respective employees in completing that goal in the most efficient and consistent manner whether it’s a patient coordinator, a practice manager or a marketing manager.

In a medical practice, an example of a workflow can be that a new potential patient has filled out the contact form on your website. Having read through a few pages on your website, and providing key information via the contact form like name, phone number, email, and a procedure of interest, this person would be considered a valid lead and enter into a lead management workflow. From the website, this lead information would be fed into the CRM and put in a queue for a patient scheduler to reach out. 

Once a human connection is made, the patient scheduler can evaluate their readiness to book a consultation or procedure. Based on that evaluation the lead is placed further down the sales funnel. Depending on their placement in the patient journey the patient scheduler can set up automated reminders for the staff to reach out at a later date, set up automated marketing about their procedure, or if an appointment is booked, drop them into a queue to automatically be sent important information about their appointment.

This is where the patient coordinators and marketing team can really take advantage of the automation that CRM platforms can provide today. It used to be that a workflow was designed in a chart and manually executed by the staff. This leaves the practice wide open to inconsistencies in communication to patients. With automated marketing tools the practice marketing team and patient coordinators deliver consistent messaging and education to every single patient.

When deciding which CRM platform to use for your practice, it’s important to choose one that has the most efficient and all-encompassing tools to achieve these goals. RSI, for example, has the intelligence to identify where someone is in the sales funnel – a lead, a new patient after their first consult, an existing patient wanting another treatment, etc. – and can drop them helpful information about what they are interested in via communication that is easiest for them to digest. Whether that’s receiving information via phone call, email, or text message. Each patient can be catered to in a completely customizable form that feels personal but is completely automated for the practice staff.