In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare, the integration of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems have become essential technologies for optimizing operational efficiency, patient care, and financial performance.
Today, the convergence of these technologies enables healthcare practices to unlock the full potential of their data, providing a 360-degree view of the patient journey from initial contact to post-treatment care and beyond.
With the proper CRM & EMR integration, practices can leverage transparent data analysis to maximize their future financial performance.
In this eBook, we’ll explore how RSI offers the ultimate CRM & EMR integration to achieve unparalleled data integration and transparency. Then, we’ll take a look at six powerful data points unlocked by RSI’s platform that enable executive leadership teams to make informed decisions that will transform practice growth and revenue.
What Does RSI Offer?
RSI provides the only healthcare focused analytics platform that provides complete transparency into the entire patient acquisition process from patient inquiry to revenue and lifetime value.
Its proprietary data warehouse integrates fragmented data sources, including communication channels (such as phone and text), marketing channels (like Google Ads, Meta Ads, email, and text), and practice management systems (encompassing patient, provider, and billing information).
This integration creates a single source of truth, revealing the interdependencies among key performance indicators (KPIs) essential for patient acquisition and retention. These KPIs include the source of inquiry, contact rate, schedule rate, attendance rate, purchase rate, and the lifetime value segmented by marketing channel, contact center team, location, provider, and insurance company.
By leveraging RSI’s comprehensive analytics, practices can make informed strategic decisions regarding:
- Marketing spend and optimization
- Contact center workflow and team member optimization
- Schedule capacity optimization
- Location and provider optimization
- Referring provider optimization
- Revenue cycle management
- And more
To illustrate the value of the data points that RSI collects and consolidates, we’ll take a closer look at six examples that highlight the potential for executive level decision making that could transform the patient acquisition process and its ROI.
1. Understand & Improve Year-over-Year Trends
One of the fundamental aspects of strategic planning and performance improvement in healthcare practices is the analysis of year-over-year trends, particularly in patient count and average charges/collections per patient. These metrics serve as critical indicators of a practice’s health and growth trajectory.
In the image below, we can see an example of year-over-year trends and the average charge per patient. At a glance, you can see some seasonal trends in the average bill per patient, as well as a few standout months in new patient acquisition. However, without further data transparency, it can be difficult to draw conclusions from this information and make impactful changes in practice operations.
With RSI’s platform, we can break down this chart even further to uncover more specific data points that provide the practice with actionable insights. For example, we could filter the same metrics (patient count and average bill per patient) and compare them across:
- Marketing channel where patient was acquired
- Provider
- Location
- Procedure
- Referral
- Insurance company attribution
By analyzing patient acquisition and patient acquisition ROI across these metrics, practices can identify the lowest-performing variables. For example, perhaps a practice finds that a certain social media platform creates relatively few new patients but requires a high ad spend. This is lowering the patient acquisition ROI, and indicates that the practice should focus on a different avenue that is driving more meaningful increases in KPIs. This analysis is made both simple and immediate because all of the data is made available through a single reporting source using RSI’s platform.
As a result, practices can avoid costly risks in making assumptions about patient acquisition. Instead, they can invest smarter and faster in the expansion and optimization of the business based on the actual historical performance of their patient acquisition efforts. A couple of data-backed decisions that could be made include:
- Investing more in the highest performing marketing channels
- Building marketing strategies around procedures with highest new patient count and charges
- Work closer with providers who are referring the most patients to the practice
2. Understand Conversion Rates & Performance Trends
The distinction between new and existing patient performance is critical for healthcare practices to understand and optimize their patient base and growth strategies. Importantly, practices should consider the differences in behaviors and preferences of their new patients compared to existing patients. Consider the chart below:
We can gather some meaningful insights at a glance, such as the increased volume of new patients immediately prior to summer (May) and during the winter months (October through January). These same months also had above-average conversions. This performance could be attributed to seasonal trends, or a number of other reasons. The issue is that practices without a comprehensive CRM & EMR integration will not recognize these trends until it is far too late. This could mean missing out on capitalizing on positive performance trends, and failing to recognize and correct negative performance trends.
RSI’s platform collects and reports data in real-time, ensuring that executive leadership teams can gather timely insights from various data points and act on them efficiently.
Furthermore, remember that RSI’s platform can filter these and other data points by valuable variables such as:
- Marketing channel where patient was acquired
- Provider
- Location
- Procedure
- Referral
- Insurance company attribution
- And more
With the ability to pinpoint trends and the variables driving them, practices can move quickly and intentionally to optimize business performance in any scenario. They can identify the variables that are most impactful in acquiring new patients, as well as which variables are most influential in getting a patient to convert to booking a surgery.
Importantly, the strategies that a practice chooses to employ at this point will depend on key comparisons between new and existing patients. For example, if RSI data indicates that existing patients have a higher lifetime value or higher conversion rates compared to new patients, a practice may decide to allocate more resources towards retention strategies, such as patient satisfaction surveys and personalized care plans. Conversely, if attracting new patients is identified as a growth opportunity, practices might invest more heavily in marketing campaigns while focusing on demographic groups with the highest potential for conversion.
3. Forecast Future Revenue
Accurate revenue forecasting is indispensable for strategic planning in healthcare practices. It allows for informed decision-making regarding budgeting, resource allocation, and investment in growth opportunities. RSI’s historical conversion rate data provides a robust foundation for forecasts by taking into account numerous factors that influence future revenue. Again, consider the chart below and the insights we might gather from it.
We’re able to see an uptick in the average of forecasted payments, but without further data transparency, it’s difficult to understand where these forecasts are coming from. Furthermore, practices without comprehensive CRM & EMR integrations will never be able to hone in on such valuable data points to begin with. With RSI, practices can leverage historical conversion rates by the following variables:
- Provider
- Location
- Marketing channel
- Procedure
- And more
This data is collected and analyzed in real-time, helping practices not just understand past performance at a high level, but also to project future revenue with a high degree of accuracy. When practices are able to model future revenue based on their inquiry volumes and conversion rates, they can plan to expand or optimize their business operations accordingly. This ensures they have the staffing, schedule availability, and workflows in place to maximize revenues when the opportunity comes. Conversely, if there’s a negative trend, they can investigate and address underlying causes promptly.
4. Recognize Collection Rate Issues
The Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) process is a critical component of a healthcare practice’s financial health, and collection rates serve as a sign of its efficiency. An effective RCM strategy ensures that practices are reimbursed for their services in a timely and complete manner.
RSI’s analytics can detect early signs of collection rate issues, enabling practices to take proactive measures to address these challenges.
Like previous examples, RSI enables practices to examine RCM performance through filters such as marketing channels and insurance companies associated with the patient. This will highlight patterns and precursors that could lead to collection rate issues.
By examining the entire patient journey, practices can identify where drop-offs in payment occur—whether it’s a front-end issue like patient eligibility or a back-end problem like claim denials. After this analysis, practices can tailor their RCM strategies to address any weaknesses. For example, if particular marketing channels attract patients who ultimately have a higher incidence of payment issues, the practice may adjust its marketing spend or patient screening processes.
5. Differentiate New & Existing Patients
The ability to differentiate between new and existing patient leads in real-time is a game-changer for healthcare practices. It’s a critical component for streamlining operations, enhancing the patient experience, and optimizing marketing campaigns.
RSI’s analytics platform provides this capability, enabling practices to match patient inquiries with their existing records instantly. Consider the chart below, which illustrates a gap of potentially hundreds of leads between new leads and total leads (new patients + existing patients).
Practices unable to distinguish between new and existing patient leads in real-time face several challenges. Marketing efforts may become generalized, failing to resonate with either audience segment. This lack of personalization can result in a lower conversion rate for new patients and decreased retention of existing ones. Operational efficiency may also suffer, as staff may spend unnecessary time on administrative tasks such as verifying patient information that could be streamlined with RSI’s real-time data.
This data helps practices optimize their workflow throughout the patient journey. New patient leads typically require more administrative attention — from collecting personal health information to educating them about the practice’s procedures. For existing patients, the focus might be on efficiently scheduling follow-up appointments or managing ongoing treatments.
Marketing is another area where the differentiation between new and existing patients can provide substantial benefits. Knowing whether leads are new or existing allows practices to allocate their resources more effectively. New patient leads might be targeted with introductory offers and educational content, while existing patients could be informed about new services or loyalty programs.
6. Understand Marketing Performance Throughout the Patient Journey
Understanding the performance of each marketing channel across the patient journey is absolutely essential, especially for practices with active campaigns spread across several marketing channels. Without a single source of truth that consolidates marketing performance across these channels, it’s difficult to compare the performance of each channel objectively and make informed decisions. Data may be siloed or incomplete, leading to a fragmented view of the patient journey and an inability to perform high-level analysis. This lack of clarity can result in suboptimal allocation of marketing resources and campaigns that fall short of their potential.
RSI’s analytics platform provides a detailed analysis of all marketing channels at each stage of the patient journey. This helps practices identify which campaigns and which marketing channels are most effective at each point in the patient journey. Furthermore, practices can get a clear return on ad spend that provides more insight into the efficacy of marketing strategies.
With this data, practices can refine their marketing efforts to focus on high-performing channels and improve or eliminate underperforming ones. For example, if social media ads are excellent at generating awareness but poor at converting leads into appointments, a practice might adjust its messaging or reallocate funds to more effective channels for conversion, like search engine optimization (SEO), which can generate large amounts of organic leads.
RSI ensures that practices can spend less to make more through the seamless analysis of marketing channel performance.
Industry-Leading CRM & EMR Integration with RSI
The integration of CRM and EMR systems is an absolute necessity for practices who want to optimize operational efficiency, patient care, and financial performance.
RSI’s platform offers a comprehensive solution to executive leadership reporting, providing a single pane of glass for practices to analyze and forecast business performance with utmost data transparency.
Practices without a proper CRM and EMR solution fail to capture the whole picture of the patient journey and the variables that influence it. RSI is the all-in-one solution that practices need to make informed, data-driven decisions that not only enhance their operational and financial health but also elevate the standard of care provided to their patients.
If you’re interested in learning how RSI can help your practice, contact us today to schedule a demo.
