Healthcare CRM Development: Types, Features, Benefits

Customer relationship management (CRM) for healthcare allows medical organizations to boost overall performance by creating measurable relationships between all the parties involved — patients, team members, referrals, and providers. This results in cost reduction, optimized medical services, and enhanced client experience.

According to the GrandViewResearch data, the global healthcare CRM market was $17.9 billion in 2023, but it is expected to gain $30.7 billion by 2030. The main drivers are the rising demand for organized, easy-to-access data and business process automation. Besides, digital transformation impacts clinical protocol management, requiring modern clinical decision support systems, such CRMs. Given such market potential and technological advancement, it’s not surprising that clinics start looking for healthcare CRM software development services.

This post will guide you through the specificities of CRM software development for healthcare, highlighting its key benefits, features, and challenges to cope with. You’ll also learn why creating medical CRM from scratch is a long-run investment.

Healthcare CRM development involves the implementation of software solutions tailored to the specific needs of medical institutions, aimed at streamlining patient interactions, managing appointments, tracking medical histories, and enhancing overall patient satisfaction. For medical service providers, CRM systems offer a centralized platform to manage patient data, appointments, and communications efficiently.

Healthcare CRM systems can automate administrative tasks, such as appointment scheduling and reminders, freeing up staff time to focus on patient care. Additionally, CRM software enables better coordination among healthcare teams, allowing for seamless collaboration and information sharing, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes and higher levels of patient satisfaction.

Healthcare CRM software development enables improved patient experience through a set of features. For instance, it can include appointment push notifications features or record conversations to assume patients’ preferred location or appointment times; automate and customize ad campaigns like sending birth cards or personalized emails. It can also handle referrals by storing data about specialists and facilities, allowing for patients' direction to a particular specialist.

Such a digital solution stores and analyzes patients’ data (e.g., demographic information, health history, insurance payments, or social data) to discover valuable insights. Understanding clients' patterns and habits allow medical institutions to brainstorm patient-oriented growth strategies. In addition, such an approach to engaging with people helps companies build lasting relationships with their clients since the interaction happens in the clients' tone.

However, the medical CRM should respond to the following healthcare CRM features:

• It requires a multi-platform solution that would make coordinating patients, healthcare organizations, physicians, health insurance, and suppliers easier.
• It should coordinate data across multiple systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), patient portals, patients’ interactions with call centers, online chats, and even subscription opt-ins.
• It must be compliant with healthcare regulations, such as HIPAA, to align with industry standards
• It should be designed to cater to the medical institution’s unique structure. That means the UI should be personalized and intuitive to ensure a smooth user experience.

We enlist below the major types of healthcare CRM software playing a crucial role in enhancing patient care, streamlining administrative processes, and improving overall healthcare management.

Patient Relationship Management CRM solution focuses on enhancing interactions between healthcare providers and patients. It helps in managing patient communication, appointments, and engagement in cooperation with physicians.

Analytics healthcare CRM solution works for leveraging data to improve decision-making and healthcare outcomes. Analytical CRM systems integrate data from various sources, including electronic health records (EHRs), to provide valuable insights into patient populations, treatment efficacy, and resource utilization.

Referral Management type of CRM solutions is designed to streamline and optimize the referral process within healthcare networks. These systems assist healthcare providers in accomplishing successful healthcare operations, efficiently managing and tracking patient referrals, ensuring seamless communication between referring and receiving physicians.

Clinical custom healthcare CRM must be specifically designed to support healthcare professionals in managing and organizing clinical workflows. These systems are often integrated with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) during the healthcare CRM development and assist in tasks such as care coordination, documentation, and treatment planning.

Let's talk more profoundly about the healthcare CRM's common functions to help the administrators and physicians comprehend patients better and satisfy the needs of healthcare facilities, increasing the effectiveness of the rendered medical services.

A healthcare CRM software development provides health organizations with the advantage of understanding their customers better. With this purpose, healthcare CRM tools can analyze data and identify different patterns related to patients, including sincerity, regularity, no-show rates, physician referrals, and the effectiveness of outreach channels. This information can be helpful for doctors to enhance their interactions with every patient, leading to improved care.

The health of high-risk patients could be greatly affected if a timely scan or blood test is delayed by a few months. To prevent this, hospitals use a healthcare CRM implementation in their processes to schedule automatic reminders for timely appointments. These reminders are sent through emails, phone calls, and text messages. Once patient details are entered into the system by hospital staff, the software platform takes care of managing them.

A medical CRM platform helps healthcare providers gather feedback from patients to understand their experiences. This feedback can enhance services and improve the patient experience for doctors and administrators. A healthcare CRM automates the process of sending and collecting feedback.

Healthcare organizations tend to use CRM systems to get a deeper understanding of their clients and optimize day-to-day operations. So let's consider the importance of CRM software for healthcare.

Healthcare CRM systems play a crucial role in reducing medical errors by providing many healthcare service vendors with access to accurate and up-to-date patient information. With centralized patient records and automated processes for documentation and medication management, healthcare CRM can help minimize the risk of errors due to illegible handwriting, miscommunication, or incomplete medical histories. By facilitating comprehensive patient assessments and treatment plans, hospital CRM allows to contribute to improved clinical decision-making and patient safety, ultimately reducing the incidence of adverse events and medical errors within medical facilities.

CRM software development for healthcare sector enhances the patient experience by enabling personalized interactions, efficient communication, and streamlined care delivery processes. Through patient portals, appointment scheduling tools, and secure messaging platforms, CRM comes to empower patients engage more actively in their healthcare journey, leading to greater satisfaction and adherence to treatment plans. Additionally, healthcare CRM tools enable proactive patient outreach, such as appointment reminders and follow-up communications, which help patients feel valued and supported throughout their healthcare interactions, ultimately boosting overall patient satisfaction and loyalty to the medical facility.

One of the fundamental benefits of CRM systems for healthcare business is their ability to reliably secure sensitive patient data. These systems employ robust security measures, including encryption, access controls, and audit trails, to safeguard patient information from unauthorized access, breaches, or cyberattacks. By adhering to strict compliance standards, such as HIPAA regulations during healthcare product development, medical customer relationship management software ensures that healthcare data remains confidential and protected, instilling trust and confidence in patients and healthcare providers alike regarding the security and privacy of their sensitive medical information.

Medical CRM streamlines the management of patient data by centralizing information from various sources, such as electronic health records (EHRs), diagnostic tests, and treatment plans, into a unified platform. This consolidation of patient data enables healthcare providers to access comprehensive patient profiles quickly, facilitating more informed decision-making and care coordination. By eliminating silos and redundancies in data management, CRM software enhances efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility of patient information, ultimately improving the quality and continuity of care delivered within medical facilities.

Healthcare CRM software development optimizes internal hospital tasks by automating administrative processes, streamlining workflows, and improving resource allocation. Features such as appointment scheduling, inventory management, and staff scheduling tools help healthcare facilities operate more efficiently, reducing wait times, minimizing bottlenecks, and maximizing productivity. By automating routine tasks and standardizing processes, CRM software frees up staff time to focus on patient care, enhances operational efficiency, and improves overall workflow management within medical facilities.

Healthcare CRM systems facilitate the collection and analysis of medical service feedback from patients, enabling medical facilities to continuously monitor and improve the quality of care provided. Through patient satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, and sentiment analysis tools, CRM software gathers valuable insights into patient experiences, preferences, and areas for improvement. This feedback loop empowers medical facilities to identify trends, address concerns, and implement strategic initiatives to enhance patient satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, ultimately driving continuous improvement and excellence in healthcare delivery.

Let’s discuss the core features of healthcare CRM you should integrate to benefit from it.

This functionality includes healthcare CRM features for organizing and storing patient demographics, medical histories, and contact information in a centralized database. It streamlines administrative tasks, such as patient registration and record retrieval, and ensures that healthcare providers have easy access to essential patient data during appointments and consultations.

The capabilities of appointment scheduling functionality enable healthcare facilities to efficiently manage patient appointments, allocate resources, and minimize scheduling conflicts. Advanced scheduling features may include automated appointment reminders, waitlist management, and the ability to sync appointments with provider calendars.

This healthcare CRM functionality facilitates secure and efficient communication between patients, healthcare providers, and staff members. These tools may include secure messaging platforms, telehealth capabilities, and patient portals that allow individuals to access their medical records, request appointments, and communicate with their healthcare team. By enabling seamless communication, healthcare CRM systems enhance patient engagement, improve care coordination, and foster stronger patient-provider relationships.

It helps healthcare teams stay organized and on track by assigning, prioritizing, and tracking tasks related to patient care, administrative duties, and follow-up activities. Task management features implemented during medical CRM software development may include deadline reminders, task delegation, and progress tracking, ensuring that no critical tasks fall through the cracks and that patient care remains a top priority.

Analytical tools empower healthcare organizations to leverage data insights for strategic decision-making, performance monitoring, and quality improvement initiatives. These features allow users to generate customizable reports, analyze key performance indicators (KPIs), and identify trends and patterns in patient outcomes, resource utilization, and operational efficiency. By providing actionable insights, analytics and reporting functionalities enable healthcare providers to identify areas for improvement, optimize workflows, and enhance the overall quality of care delivered to patients.

They are essential for seamlessly connecting healthcare CRM systems with other existing software applications, such as performing healthcare EMR integration, billing systems, and third-party tools implementation. Integration features ensure interoperability, data exchange, and consistency across different platforms, allowing for a more comprehensive healthcare management ecosystem.

CRM software development for healthcare can be performed in many directions. We’ll describe the traditional Agile model in SDLC to build such a digital solution.

Before embarking on healthcare CRM software development, you need to find a reliable software development company to ask for rendering healthcare software development services. When looking for a custom software development company to cooperate with, consider the vendor's expertise in the healthcare niche, check the portfolio to see what medical projects have been delivered and what technology stack was used, and read feedback from clients on professional platforms, like Clutch.

Look through our Clutch profile to discover our customers’ feedback and the latest healthcare projects we’ve delivered.

This stage is related to the Discovery Phase in software development. The business analysts investigate your product concept, business goals, target audience, and intended market. After that, they form a project specification plan that includes all the details concerning CRM software development for healthcare (features, security requirements, third-party services, tech stack, etc.). The functionality should match the company's goals and serve as the instrument for their achievement.

You should also pick software architecture based on your platform and non-functional requirements. These days DevOps experts suggest considering cloud computing architecture for modern healthcare solutions. This model works great for complex interconnected systems, such as CRMs, since it enables scalability and convenient Interoperability between multiple data sources.

The design team defines critical user scenarios (e.g., patient segmentation, reporting) and visualizes the main functionality. To streamline the user journey inside the system, our design team sticks to the following rules:

• Picturing the user journey from the point of “end-user”. Designers analyze the preferences and logic of the end-users and make interfaces based on them.
• Reducing the number of actions required to accomplish the task. We try to cluster the functions to make associated actions reachable in one click. This enables the elimination of redundant elements and facilitates “user-CRM” interactions.
• Displaying critical information at the start of the user journey. Healthcare providers frequently open CRM to review the appointment schedule or lab results. To optimize the user journey, the essential information is located on the main screen for quicker access.

It’s the most responsible and challenging part of healthcare CRM development. During this stage, the software engineers build a backend and frontend of your CRM platform and integrate APIs to facilitate data sharing with third-party apps. After the custom healthcare CRM development is finished, it should be interconnected with other business solutions to cover all business operations and scale profit through systems' synergies.

Testing experts execute multiple manual and automated tests to check the health CRM functional requirements and mitigate the functioning flaw. This stage also intends to evaluate whether your system is ready for deployment and complies with core security and legislative norms. Before the final client review, the team verifies all the functionality (including integrations, usability, and security) to ensure the healthcare CRM performs as expected and meets project requirements.

Once all previous healthcare CRM software development stages have passed, it's time to deliver a ready-made solution to the end customers and stakeholders for testing and feedback. Then, based on collected information, you make modifications if needed. CRM systems for healthcare may require multi-tier support due to their complexity. Therefore, it’s better to continue cooperation rendering the dedicated development team services to create value in the long term. Moreover, system security and standards compliance have to be verified regularly.

Medical CRM development isn't fundamentally differ from any other digital system's creation. However, it has some specialties related to regulatory compliance and data protection arising particularly in the healthcare industry.

Since healthcare CRMs process and store vast amounts of sensitive patient data, they must be compliant with strict medical regulations, such as HIPAA. The list of laws will differ from county to county and project specificity. That's why, before initiating your own CRM project for healthcare, conduct research to know what industry standards you must adhere to.

Healthcare cybersecurity has become one of the leading issues in the healthcare industry. That's why it's critical to consider at least basic security measures to secure electronic patient healthcare information (ePHI):

• Personnel training. About 40% of employees are missing cybersecurity knowledge. Therefore, professional training is critical to prepare the workforce for possible malicious actions. It includes identifying phishing emails, creating regular data backups, using strong passwords, etc.
• Data access safeguards. Medical organizations should control and trace suspicious activity in the system. It’s recommended to incorporate systems that block unauthorized access to data, avoid exchanging of unauthorized emails, prevent data from being copied, etc. It is also good to employ advanced technology, such as blockchain, for data encryption during transferring and storage.
• Tracking of mobile and portable devices. Mobile phones, apps, and IoMT devices are widely applied for remote patient monitoring. To safeguard mobile data and IoT networks, you should consider multi-layered authentication, remote blocking of lost/stolen smartphones as well as legacy systems modernization (including safety apps and medical sensor control systems.

ISO standards in healthcare are about guaranteeing patients have access to high-quality medical services as is needed. By incorporating ISO standards, you assume obligations to quality, transparency, safety, and accountability rules. These standards make it easier to address challenging and ever-evolving requirements of data security. The set of ISO standards varies from quality (ISO 9001), environmental (ISO 14001), and energy management (ISO 50001) to information security (ISO/IEC 27001).

Achieving ISO Certification became more accessible thanks to today’s modernized systems. To become ISO certified, you need to go through the basic steps:

1. Choose the type of ISO certification
2. Prepare all the relevant information about your organization
3. Select a trustworthy ISO Registrar
4. Make an application as prescribed
5. Run through the verification procedure
6. After your management system is approved, you will be awarded the needed ISO standard.

CRM in healthcare produces valuable insight by analyzing data obtained from numerous resources. That’s why it should be integrated with other medical management systems and tools, such as:

• Electronic Health Records (EHR)
• Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)
• Quality Management System (QMS)
• Radiology Information Systems (RIS)
• Patient portals

The software should also be consolidated with medical billing, accounting, human resources management (HRM), and other back-office systems. Moreover, it is important to use the benefits of medical device integration with healthcare CRM after it's built. Merging different types of software enables records consolidation and consistency.

Healthcare APIs significantly foster device interoperability. By applying APIs, healthcare institutions can seamlessly transmit patients’ records between multiple informational networks and merge them in one place. It makes it easier to harmonize the patient care delivery across a set of parties involved. Based on our experience, here critical APIs for healthcare CRM software development:

• Registration API
• Scheduling API
• Financial API
• Hospital Management API

As you can see, there are some specificities in initiating digital healthcare solutions. However, relying on Cleveroad’s experience in healthcare software development, you’ll be ensured in handling all the issues concerning healthcare CRM software development.

Cleveroad is an outsourcing healthcare software development tech partner with proven expertise in delivering custom digital solutions for the medical business and/or modernizing the existing medical systems. With long experience in healthcare custom software development (since 2011), our team offers full-cycle IT services for medical organizations that automate business workflow, facilitate data transmission, and improve patient care delivery.

Being an ISO-certified IT vendor and passing certifications for ISO 27001:2013 (security) and ISO 9001:2015 (quality) Standards, our team is ready to help you develop a secure and top-notch healthcare CRM system for better care coordination in your medical facility.

By collaborating with us, you’ll get:

• Hands-on experience building healthcare solutions, such as EHR, EMR, eRx, patient portals, remote patient monitoring software, etc.
• Building telemedicine software solutions that comply with HIPAA, HITECH, PIPEDA, GDPR, and other domain regulations
• Conducting healthcare CRM development and delivering medical CRM systems along with industry regulatory standards, such as ISO and FDA regulatory requirements
• On-demand services: software modernization services, cloud migration, IoT software engineering, blockchain integration IT services, etc.
• Knowing peculiarities of cloud services, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform
• A thorough consultation with our Healthcare Subject Matter IT experts regarding the healthcare CRM system development and integration
• Signing Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) as requested

Let us prove our competence in delivering telehealth projects by introducing our latest case — Telemedicine management system (tapGP). The core idea behind this project is to build a robotized medical system for remotely providing 24/7 access to health-related services.

Our UK-based client received a solution suited to the specific business needs enabling users to schedule medical appointments online. The platform incorporates RBAC access to the systems for physicians, customers, and admins to provide fitting opportunities for each party involved. In addition, the platform is fully compliant with the relevant legislation. The output of our client is a custom SaaS-based platform that increases performance by automating the care delivery process and patients.