For medical institutions, having a top-notch reputation and knowing how to attract new patients is as important as it is for companies that sell products and services. Yet, many more rules and regulations are involved with healthcare because sensitive health information is at stake. That is why a HIPAA-compliant CRM is a direct way toward safe and secure digital marketing practices, taking healthcare services to the next level.
According to Statista, the revenue in the global CRM market is booming and has reached $79 billion. Besides, various CRM-related services like electronic appointment booking are among the most used when patients interact with digital healthcare. Putting these two factors together, one thing is clear. There is a growing demand for HIPAA-compliant CRM software because it brings revenue and is crucial for offering greater access to healthcare services for patients.
Putting all the puzzle pieces together, let’s focus on some critical “whys” related to healthcare CRM software. We should establish the foundation, define the key terms, focus on key reasons why you need a CRM, and provide practical insights into choosing a CRM that is right for you.
Ready to secure your patient relationships? In the competitive healthcare landscape, trust is your most valuable asset. Contact SPsoft to discover how we can help you implement or build a CRM that ensures absolute compliance while maximizing your patient growth!
Table of Contents
What Is EHR in CRM, and How Are Both Used?
The first thing to consider is the link between Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in healthcare. When it comes to the “whys,” it is crucial to understand how the two systems work together and how they redefine healthcare delivery.
Despite being in use since the 1970s, the market for EHRs experiences slight yet stable growth.
It means medical institutions still use EHRs as a primary way of handling patient data. Yet, when bringing CRM systems into the picture, healthcare professionals receive a new way to generate patient leads. More specifically, while EHRs store and process patient data, an integrated CRM platform utilizes this information to track new leads.
CRM for healthcare aided by EHR is a direct path toward seeing if a potential lead booked an appointment, the specific reasons why a person decided not to become a patient, or why their insurance was not accepted. Currently, CRM is a direct way to turn leads into patients. However, while many medical institutions have EHRs, few have viable CRM solutions.
Respectively, suppose an institution decides to boost its practice of turning leads into patients and get a CRM solution. In that case, it must be HIPAA compliant, which is especially important if you plan to use telehealth solutions.
What is HIPAA in Healthcare?
If a healthcare organization plans to get a new software solution in some form or another, HIPAA compliance will be one of the key factors in the process. The same is true for a HIPAA-compliant CRM. The healthcare industry is one of the most regulated, and there are significant reasons behind that. Everything starts with knowing exactly what the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act entails.
In a nutshell, HIPAA is a set of HIPAA regulations designed to improve how patient data is handled to promote data privacy and security. The core of these HIPAA rules regulates how healthcare providers use protected health information (PHI) – personal patient identifiers.
Overall, when maintaining compliance, healthcare institutions ensure the security of their patient data handling methods and establish CRM system controls per HIPAA requirements. Otherwise, there is a high chance of exposure to data breaches and the loss of protected health information. Yet, there are many more reasons to care about compliance with HIPAA.
Why Care about HIPAA Compliance?
HIPAA compliance for software is crucial for multiple reasons. With the healthcare CRM market booming, a growing number of healthcare businesses should prioritize it.
Yet, when speaking in more general terms, consider these critical factors about adopting a HIPAA-compliant CRM system.
Legal-Based Aspect
If your CRM is a software that works with PHIs, there is a legal demand for you to comply with HIPAA regulations. You must avoid specific violations; otherwise, massive fines and potential litigation are on the way. Besides, failure to comply with HIPAA can result in penalties as high as $1.5 million per year and even result in imprisonment for severe cases of neglect.
Improved Patient Experience and Satisfaction
HIPAA compliance is crucial for patients to know their healthcare information is secure. People will always choose the institution that uses a platform designed for healthcare that is made HIPAA compliant. If you care about a better patient experience and satisfaction, ensuring your CRM for healthcare provides safety is vital.
Cost-Effective Approach
Being HIPAA compliant is a great way to save costs. When your CRM system is fully HIPAA compliant, you save yourself from paying huge fines. Second, if you have a HIPAA-compliant CRM system, you do not need to use different tools to manage patient data and boost patient engagement. You streamline healthcare services while also improving their efficiency.
Patients’ Trust
When you comply with HIPAA, it means you care about patient data security. It is the best proof of an environment built for sensitive information protection. When patients know your healthcare CRM platform is fully HIPAA compliant, they are more likely to trust you. Establishing patient trust is the cornerstone for turning leads into new patients.
Healthcare Professional Sanctions and Reduction of Medical Neglect
HIPAA compliance also helps improve the quality of medical services and enables healthcare professionals to manage data appropriately by adhering to HIPAA standards. That’s because the violation of HIPAA rules leads to sanctions and additional training, which decreases the chance of medical malpractice happening again.
After all, there is sufficient evidence to say that HIPAA compliance is crucial for adopting CRM for healthcare and any software product working with PHIs.
7 Reasons Why You Need HIPAA-Compliant CRM Software
Building a HIPAA-compliant CRM system for the healthcare industry is complex. Here are seven key reasons why healthcare companies need a HIPAA-compliant CRM software solution:
Enhanced Data Handling and Lead Communication Compliance
Whether you have the most innovative product employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data does not matter. If you do not know how to handle these to ensure data privacy, there is no use of the techs at hand. Medical institutions of all shapes and sizes often use direct communication channels like email to send patient leads submission forms containing sensitive information. Respectively, this is a direct way for a data breach to happen.
.A HIPAA-compliant CRM ensures that communication between healthcare providers and leads is encrypted. With a CRM system designed to meet these needs, innovation comes toe-to-toe with security. As a result, bringing HIPAA compliance into the game means you can tap into secure data handling techniques and have protected communication channels.
Advanced Patient Lead Tracking
Using healthcare CRM software helps improve patient lead tracking. This reason applies to many techs in which you can use your CRM. To illustrate, whether you are using Zoho CRM or a custom build, you can track the entire lifecycle while keeping health information secure. As a result, CRM for healthcare provides visibility, ensuring no lead is lost in a messy inbox.
CRM for healthcare is all about optimization. It helps unify the information on leads and lets certain people who access it see a clear picture of how leads are brought into the system. With these insights, one can find a better way of turning leads into patients.
Marketing-Based Insights and Integrations
Medical CRM options compliant with HIPAA provide unique perspectives on how marketing operations can help bring new leads on board. A healthcare CRM must link call tracking to marketing campaigns. By ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations, you can safely analyze which social media or ads bring in the most leads without exposing protected health information.
With HIPAA-compliant healthcare CRM software, you have a clear picture of how your marketing department works and what are the most inefficiencies it faces. Thus, equipped with crucial insights, you can emphasize particular medical marketing KPIs vital for growing the practice and getting even more patients.
A Deeper Understanding of Lead Generation Ins-and-Outs
Another critical reason for having HIPAA-compliant CRM software is an in-depth understanding of how all the potential leads are being worked. For instance, you can have a CRM at the front desk. A CRM platform designed for medical use allows administrators to monitor how your front desk handles inquiries. This visibility is crucial for healthcare to ensure that leads are converted into patients efficiently and respectfully.
The thing is, front desks at medical institutions are often so overwhelmed and busy that many leads are not contacted back fast enough for a lead to become a patient. Remember that a lead contacting the front office means the marketing team did their job, and a lead knows about your organization. Respectively, depending on how effectively a front desk handles leads depends on whether you have a new patient or not.
Automated Patient Leads Generation
While about 66% of medical institutions use some degree of automation, there is still one-third of hospitals that do all the work manually. Yet, even with a partial degree of automation implemented, many healthcare facilities still work with leads manually. For example, there is a high chance that when a lead calls a front office, the staff needs to call the lead back at least several times. Yet, referring to the statistics mentioned, most patients prefer the digitization of healthcare, which entails having digital channels of communication as well.
A HIPAA-compliant CRM can automate lead nurturing through secure digital channels, even using AI for human-like interaction while you adhere to HIPAA regulations. Besides, with the existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, one can achieve a human-like interaction with leads. In the end, it means better lead nurturing and more patients.
Better Customer Relationships
Maintaining relationships with existing patients is easier when you need a CRM. By feeding habit data into the healthcare CRM, you can get invaluable feedback to ensure your solution for healthcare meets user needs. With this in mind, you care for potential leads and active patients. Naturally, you cannot work through the patient data and get feedback if the healthcare CRM software you use is not HIPAA compliant.
Taking Credibility to the Next Level
When speaking about the general benefits of HIPAA, we have mentioned the chance to boost patient trust. With HIPAA-compliant CRM, it can be taken to the next level. Nothing speaks louder about credibility than how you handle protected health information. A HIPAA-compliant CRM boosts your reputation, making potential leads more likely to choose you over competitors.
When patients are sure their data is safe and being handled correctly, they are more likely to recommend your healthcare institution as a credible one. This means potential leads can turn into patients much faster due to your preceding reputation. With all the automation, innovation, and digitization, many patients still use word of mouth approach when considering various options for getting healthcare services. So, you want to be on the right side of the spectrum.
Top HIPAA-Compliant CRMs on the Market
Here are the top three HIPAA-compliant CRM to choose from.
Caspio
Caspio is HIPAA-compliant CRM software that you can use for 14 days free of charge. This platform provides drag-and-drop features, allowing healthcare organizations to create custom workflows with low-code tools. It is a software specifically tailored for personalization, though you must ensure it is made HIPAA compliant through proper configuration. Yet, it would help if you remembered that Caspio was not created exclusively for healthcare initially.
Salesforce Health Cloud
Salesforce Health Cloud is a robust HIPAA-compliant CRM platform that allows healthcare providers to have a 360-degree view of the patient. This solution has an impressive toolkit and makes care planning and insurance data modeling as easy as possible. Moreover, the tool is tailored to healthcare and is arguably the best CRM for healthcare due to its massive integration capabilities. If Salesforce Health Cloud doesn’t have the feature you need, you can compensate for that among numerous third-party and native integration options.
Monday
Monday is also a HIPAA-compliant CRM helping healthcare providers handle patient data security. This tool puts a massive emphasis on data protection. It comes with IP restrictions and a panic button to prevent a data breach in its tracks. In a nutshell, Monday is a CRM platform designed to track patient histories and manage marketing. It helps healthcare organizations manage workflows while staying fully HIPAA compliant.
The Takeaways
A HIPAA-compliant CRM exists to turn leads into patients, ensuring that better user experience and healthcare services do not come at the price of health information security. Whether you use Zoho CRM, Salesforce, or a custom CRM solution, the goal is to maintain compliance and protect your patients. Thus, you should have a pretty good idea of why your business needs HIPAA-compliant CRM software, what features it must have, and how to choose the right one.
Are you ready to elevate your patient growth strategy? Contact us to discuss the right healthcare CRM strategy for your organization — whether it’s choosing the existing one or building a custom platform from scratch!
FAQ
What is a HIPAA-compliant CRM?
A HIPAA-compliant CRM is a specialized CRM system designed to handle patient relationships while strictly adhering to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act standards. Unlike general CRM software, a HIPAA CRM platform includes specific technical safeguards like data encryption at rest and in transit, audit logs, and automatic logouts. These systems ensure that protected health information (PHI) is only accessible to authorized healthcare professionals.
Why is HIPAA compliance important for healthcare CRM software?
HIPAA compliance is important as it protects both the patient and the healthcare organization from the devastating effects of data breaches. When healthcare providers use a CRM system, they are often handling sensitive protected health information. Failure to comply with HIPAA can lead to civil and criminal penalties, including fines up to $1.5 million. Moreover, using a fully HIPAA compliant CRM solution builds patient trust, as it proves the institution takes health information privacy, safety, and security seriously.
How does a CRM system integrate with EHRs?
A healthcare CRM often integrates with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to provide a unified view of the patient. While the EHR handles clinical data, the CRM focuses on the patient relationship, lead generation, and marketing. The CRM should be able to pull demographic data from the EHR to automate appointment reminders or follow-up communications. This integration allows healthcare professionals to manage the entire patient lifecycle, ensuring a seamless flow of health information across the healthcare organization.
What should a healthcare CRM provide in terms of security?
A healthcare CRM must provide robust security features, including end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and role-based access controls. Compliance with HIPAA requires the CRM system to maintain detailed audit logs, recording every instance where protected health information was accessed or modified. Also, the CRM should enable secure communication between patients and providers, such as encrypted portals or secure messaging. Ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations means the CRM provider must also offer data redundancy and disaster recovery plans to prevent the loss of critical health information.
Can I use a general CRM like Zoho or Salesforce for healthcare?
You can use general platforms like Zoho CRM or Salesforce, but they must be specifically configured to meet HIPAA standards. For example, Salesforce Health Cloud is a specialized platform designed for healthcare that builds on the standard CRM features. When choosing a CRM, you must ensure the CRM vendor will sign a business associate agreement (BAA). Without it, the CRM software is not considered HIPAA compliant, despite its technical features.
What are the benefits of using a HIPAA-compliant CRM for marketing?
Using a HIPAA-compliant CRM for marketing allows healthcare providers to track lead generation and ROI without risking a data breach. CRM for healthcare provides insights into which campaigns are most effective at turning leads into patients. Because the CRM platform is HIPAA compliant, the marketing team can safely use protected health information for targeted outreach, ensuring they have obtained the necessary patient consent. This compliance with HIPAA regulations ensures that marketing efforts adhere to HIPAA privacy rules at all times.
How does a HIPAA-compliant CRM improve patient trust?
A HIPAA-compliant CRM system improves trust by showing patients that their protected health information is handled with the utmost care. When a healthcare organization can guarantee that they comply with HIPAA regulations, patients feel safer sharing the sensitive data necessary for accurate treatment. Features like secure patient portals and encrypted communication channels demonstrate a commitment to data privacy. In the digital age, being fully HIPAA compliant is a powerful differentiator that helps medical providers stand out as credible and trustworthy ones.
Is it better to build a CRM from scratch or buy one?
The choice between building a custom CRM for healthcare or buying a ready-to-use CRM system depends on the specific needs of healthcare providers. A custom CRM solution can be perfectly tailored to healthcare workflows but takes more time and money to make HIPAA compliant. A ready-to-use software solution like Zoho CRM or Salesforce is faster to implement but might require extra add-ons to meet HIPAA standards. Healthcare companies must calculate the ROI of each healthcare CRM system option, considering that maintaining compliance is a long-term commitment regardless of the CRM platform chosen.
