How fondly does an entire generation of folks remember seeing Laura Ingalls running down that grassy hill in the opening credits of Little House on the Prairie. No longer are we living in the age of Little House on the Prairie where a region’s healthcare services are provided by someone like Doc Baker who either had to render medical care to his patients by the townsfolk hitching up the wagon and traveling on into town or, if you were lucky, the doc could saddled up his horse and ride on out to the farmstead to deliver medical services. These are now merely quaint visions of a bygone era. Ever-evolving technology has forever changed the landscape in which medical professionals operate within.
In today’s society, healthcare services are no longer only confined within the walls of hospitals, traditional clinics nor doctors’ offices. With a rapidly changing, growing and aging population has come the need for more mobile, connected and independent healthcare services to follow suit. Healthcare services are starting to follow patients when and where they need it: community clinics, specialty pharmacy and ad hoc services on private and corporate premises, outpatient-style facilities and in-home care for those determined to “age in place” with their own independent lifestyles. Add these services to those of a traditional patient or practice service model, and their information needs and connectivity can become an administrative nightmare.
As with any problem or business need facing healthcare professionals in today’s society, there is a veritable cornucopia of software solutions out to address the ever increasing demands placed on today’s healthcare organizations. Many are adopting customer relationship management technologies to increase efficiency, improve patient satisfaction, and to help providers to proactively manage patient’s overall health, which improves patient outcomes. One such software platform making inroads into the healthcare information technology arena, and offering quite a lot of versatility and power, is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software solution. Microsoft CRM is offered within the Microsoft Dynamics platform suite of software solutions. Here at Engage, Inc. it has enabled us to offer a variety of CRM built solution accelerators to ancillary healthcare operations which are now enabled with the same visibility, operational ease and delivery capabilities as if the patients were housed with their existing facility. Best of all CRM securely enables the data for your partners, clinical staff and clients securely via the web, telephone, or other healthcare appropriate environment.
Microsoft Dynamic CRM offered us a framework in which to provide one of our healthcare customers a solution to their business need. The business need was to coordinate services provided by clinicians at clinics. As defined by our use case, a clinic was determined to be a service provided for one or more patients where you have to coordinate the arrival of healthcare providers and/or medical supplies. We have all been witness to, during flu season, the multitude of flu clinics emerging to address immunizations or have seen various health fairs throughout the year. However, the challenge was enabling clinicians to be “mobile” in order to travel to meet scheduled appointments at various clinics during their daily “rounds.” Microsoft CRM enabled us to provide a solution to connect healthcare by providing the ability to automate care coordination activities around clinics. This ability comes in the form of being able to access the schedule function within our CRM solution remotely from a phone or Internet, so that clinicians have the ability to “check in” and “check out” of their scheduled times at various clinics they have been scheduled appointments for thus giving them the ability to maintain their schedule real-time and allow the clinicians more mobility. Additionally, our CRM solution can be configured with workflows to proactively reach out to clinicians and call them with an automated message reminding them of impending appointments on their schedules. On the reciprocal side of this solution, patients and clinicians can also access the scheduling feature via the Internet. A clinician can log onto the application via the web in order to view all available clinic schedules and sign up for the one(s) they wish to provide services for. A patient may also access the application via the web in order to sign up for individual appointments at clinics provided by the aforementioned clinicians. Additionally, the patient can additionally prepay for these services and print out a voucher. This enables healthcare providers to speed up service delivery, provide self-service and management options, and reduce the volume of calls and staff time for administrative needs, thus enabling healthcare providers to focus on the delivery of care. Through some of these initial features we have expanded our healthcare connectivity solutions by offering our customers real time monitoring of shipments to the clinics. Within our CRM solution we have given the customer the ability to link to shipping vendors, such as UPS, in order to provide a tracking mechanism for the clinics to track the shipment of supplies, medical or otherwise, to the clinics in order to verify that items will be available in time to meet the scheduled appointments. We have even enabled the solution the ability to reach out to clinicians so they may even receive training over the phone. A clinician can simply call in, just as if they were checking in, but instead select a different option from the voice tree in order to receive some verbal real time training or instruction enabling more freedom of mobility for the clinician.
After years of experience with McKesson, Eclipsys and other various healthcare information technology companies, my initial thought of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to healthcare was, “huh?” However, when you think about what Microsoft Dynamics CRM does well, tracking and managing customer relationships, it becomes more clear that its’ use in healthcare seems natural. After all one of the primary responsibilities of any good healthcare information solution is to manage and track patient (i.e. your customer) data. This has broadened my perspective in healthcare information technology as to what can be considered as frameworks or platforms to construct potential solutions to healthcare needs, including connecting healthcare today.
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