CRM software plays an integral part in every industry — and that includes the healthcare sector. A healthcare CRM may sound unconventional. After all, typical CRM functionalities seem more centered on marketing and sales, right? Yes, but CRMs designed for the specific challenges and processes of healthcare organizations can offer a lot of benefits.

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Picking the right CRM can be tricky, so we’ve put together a list of the top CRM solutions targeted at healthcare organizations. We’ll cover everything you need to know about healthcare CRM and its features and functionalities.

The Article Covers:

• What Is a Healthcare CRM?
• What Does a Healthcare CRM Do?
• Types
• Primary Benefits
• Key Features
• Questions to Ask Before Investing
• Medical CRM Integrations
• Quality Checklist for Medical CRM
• Best Healthcare CRM Software
  • Salesforce Health Cloud
  • HG Mercury CRM
  • Freshsales
  • Pega Customer Service for Healthcare
  • Influx MD
• Achieving Customer Satisfaction

What Is a Healthcare CRM?

A healthcare CRM is specifically designed for medical institutions such as hospitals, medical centers, clinics, laboratories and more. It enables you to follow the best processes, track patients’ medical history, bills and visits, and schedule appointments through an online portal. You can manage contacts of patients, doctors and other medical professionals and monitor referral networks.

What Does a Healthcare CRM Do?

A healthcare CRM helps your business in different aspects:

• Lets you focus on marketing and sales.
• Helps find new patients and expand practices.
• Arranges customer support.
• Helps you build online resource centers, create tickets and track issues.
• Offers a unified dashboard for all communications.
• Manages online reputation.
• Tracks engagement across social media and other review sites.
• Enables you to address criticisms.

Types

To cater to the diverse, individual needs of medical institutions, vendors offer several kinds of healthcare CRMs, like:

• Medical data management
• Patient relationship management
• Treatment sales pipelines
• New patient acquisition
• Referral management
• Patient engagement
• Appointment scheduling
• Payer management
• Clinic reputation management

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Primary Benefits

With healthcare CRM, healthcare organizations can leverage the following key benefits:

• Enhanced Patient Satisfaction: Knowing more about patient needs and behavior helps you develop better relationships. Proactively manage their health status and address gaps in your engagement strategy. You can also regulate administrative tasks to focus on patients’ needs, helping you improve patient satisfaction and retention.
• Faster Resolution: Assess each patient’s health and identify the cause of recurring issues reported to offer faster resolutions.
• Synced Services: Service reps can access patient information whenever required and respond quickly to their inquiries. Different departments across your organization can also share, view and contribute to consumer and patient profiles.
• Faster Deal Closure: Enable dynamic and highly personalized outreach to target populations across channels and check individual lead progress. You can monitor the risks of prospective outreach accounts via any device and minimize duplication.
• Centralized Information: Access consumer and patient data from a central database. Create a 360-degree view of patients, consumers and households by integrating data from different sources using a cloud-based CRM. This enables authorized users to access patient insights on multiple devices, anytime.
• Reporting and Analytics: Check if your patient engagement tactics are successful through configurable reporting and focus on more important metrics. Identify who would be most interested in specific classes and events based on prior engagement and medical history.

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Key Features

A healthcare CRM is similar to a regular CRM, with the main difference being the unique functionality required by healthcare providers.

The healthcare industry mainly focuses on two types of CRM software — one that enables organizations to stay connected with their patients and one to facilitate connections between general and specialized practices.

Each will have its own set of requirements and accompanying features. However, these are the primary features to keep in mind when looking for a CRM to support your healthcare needs.

Patient Engagement

Running a medical institution requires a lot of patient engagement. Just like engaging with your customers is incredibly important in order to foster a long-term relationship in a business, it’s essential to maintain patient relationships too.

Healthcare CRM software provides automation to manage the communication workload. For example, you can schedule mass email newsletters with updates on your facilities, offers and industry news. You can also provide health tips in these newsletters, making your patients feel like you’re actively helping them live a healthy life. Such practices help develop patient relations and encourage them to stay loyal.

Customer Service

With immediate access to a patient’s personal and medical data, customer service reps can promptly book appointments with specialists, answer condition-related questions and perform other informed actions during patient interactions. The support is available through phone, text messages, social media, live chat or email.

Consistent Compliance

Compliance in any industry is important but difficult to carry out. HIPAA regulations are among the strictest there are, making it vital that you have tools to adequately handle its requirements. Healthcare CRM solutions can help by making sure you meet these regulations.

Additionally, keeping patient information digital removes the need to manage paper documents. Many CRM systems include cybersecurity capabilities, helping you protect patient information. In other words, no one could gain access to sensitive information accidentally because you misplaced a file. This is highly important for the healthcare industry since it has the highest data breach cost compared to any other industry.

Sales and Marketing

CRM systems for healthcare help marketing teams with targeted promotions. It simplifies feedback collection, satisfaction measurement and patient need identification, leading to improved performance and reduced churn rate. Medical CRM also helps follow up leads timely and detect issues with lead nurturing.

Communication Tools

The number one priority of any healthcare organization is to take care of its patients. The best organizations constantly strive to be more patient-centric, ensuring that no patient ever gets left out.

Healthcare CRM meets this goal by facilitating communication, so it’s easier to be available and provide 360-degree attention to patients. It can also store patient data similar to EHR software, including tests, diagnoses and treatments, providing physicians access to each patient’s history whenever needed. Additionally, chat features allow physicians to collaborate, advise each other and share expertise.

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Collaborative Task Management

With automated workflows, you can track notifications about urgent tasks, scheduled events, and training or maintenance sessions. Medical CRM helps users exchange requests and information, submit tickets, and receive help across departments.

Managers can distribute workload after checking a team’s progress and schedule. It enables professionals from different locations to communicate in a secure and compliant way.

Document Management

Store all patient-related documents securely in a CRM for easy and immediate access. You can create invoices and certificates using templates. Reduce paperwork and manual record-keeping tasks, allowing employees to focus on patients and high-alert work.

Smart Segmentation

The ability to segment incoming appointment requests and other inquiries enables you to keep everything organized. You can prioritize requests based on location, conditions, affiliated physicians, referring partners, medical history and diagnosis, family records, and other factors. Email, texts and chats let professionals easily communicate about the same data.

Contact Management

Contact management is the backbone of any CRM system. With healthcare CRM software, it acts as an effective tool for expanding and maintaining a consistent patient base. It allows you to organize and arrange your various contacts into groups based on things like demographics, medical needs, position in the sales funnel or any combination you find helpful.

This segmentation allows you to target these patients more effectively with your marketing and sales materials, increasing their chances of returning to your organization.

Reporting

Reporting is an important part of every CRM software. It’s not easy to manually plan, implement and review marketing efforts, even for the healthcare sector, but a healthcare CRM helps you maintain and track ROI. This way, you know which campaigns are generating leads, helping acquire patients and most benefiting your medical center.

Data insights can help improve your hospital by lowering patient acquisition costs as well. When combined with patient records, you can more readily identify the best people to reach out to and understand the kind of service or product they need. With this increased efficiency in outreach, you can avoid spending money trying to engage patients who may not need your service at the moment.

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Needs Analysis

What Should You Look For in a Vendor?

While evaluating vendors, look at healthcare-oriented CRM offerings and not generic services. These should include:

• A database designed specifically for healthcare.
• Built-in segmentation for targeting the right audience during campaigns.
• A contact center to ensure a unified patient experience.
• Flexibility and configurability of the platform.
• Professional healthcare CRM experts.

What Should You Consider Before Implementation?

Understand business goals thoroughly before finalizing your choice. Analyze major use cases, specific functionalities and the driving force behind your purchase. For example, if you aim to deliver absolutely personalized experiences, you should look for a solution that supports API integrations and comes with core marketing systems. Also, consider different data sources from which the system will pull information.

How Does a Healthcare CRM Help Ensure Patient Loyalty?

With a holistic view of audience profiles, customer service reps can send a variety of messages based on communication preferences. These might include follow-up notes, wellness advice, post-discharge communications and appointment reminders. With such personalized communications, you can improve patient engagement and loyalty as they prefer to interact with organizations that cater to their needs.

How Can You Demonstrate Marketing ROI?

A healthcare CRM helps you plan, implement and review marketing campaigns. You can track progress throughout the campaign lifecycle and check performance in real time. The system offers detailed reports, enabling you to see which campaigns are generating leads, acquiring patients and making profitable growth.

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Medical CRM Integrations

Practice Management

Integration with a practice management system helps manage the administrative processes necessary for running a practice, hospital or other healthcare organization. It can automate tasks that would otherwise take several hours to complete, freeing your time for more important tasks.

For example, billing information can be recorded automatically in the CRM, including late payments and insurance provider information.

EHR and EMR

EHR and EMR integration streamlines and automates otherwise manual processes. EHR and EMR systems automatically record medical inputs rather than administrative information about your patients.

After your patients come in for an appointment, get diagnosed and receive treatment, that information is logged in an EHR and/or EMR. With integration in place, that data is then automatically entered in the patient’s profile in the CRM, giving you a complete view of your patients.

Syncing your EMR or EHR with your healthcare CRM promotes patient engagement. For instance, if you have a patient that’s receiving a certain type of treatment, you can use your CRM to add them to a group of patients that receive offers and information that’s relevant to their treatment plan.

Patient Portals

Engage your patients by giving them access to their medical records. Patients can schedule an appointment through a patient portal and automatically log it in their CRM profile. It generates an automated record containing information on when a patient made an appointment, when it took place and what it was for.

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Healthcare Analytics

Analyze data with robust and secure reporting tools and use your CRM as a source of valuable medical insights.

eRx Software

Validate prescriptions by checking them with patient profiles quickly.

Telehealth

Healthcare professionals can offer consultations remotely by checking patients’ complete interaction history.

Medical IoT

Keep an eye on patients’ conditions in real time to access actionable data faster by connecting your CRM to their smart devices.

Revenue Cycle Management

Simplify payments and streamline accounting workflows by matching billing information with patient profiles.

Patient-generated Health Data

Compile patients’ complete medical history by integrating data from different medical devices and enable them to input data manually.

Quality Checklist for Medical CRM

Security

A medical CRM system must use the latest security technology to protect sensitive information from cyber threats.

Interoperability

Look for a platform that you can integrate with third-party systems through APIs or custom connectors. To create a barrier-free data flow throughout the organization, all systems should be compatible and connected.

Flexibility

Your CRM solution should be flexible enough to cater to evolving business needs. Choose a platform that you can customize based on your requirements.

Ease of Use

A healthcare CRM should have a logical and user-friendly UI/UX to reduce manual workload and streamline routine tasks.

Cross-platform Compatibility

A truly accessible CRM should run on any operating system and device. Select a tool that you can run on major platforms and deploy on-premise or in the cloud.

Manageability

Admins and executives must have easy access to internal workflow and user account management.

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Best Healthcare CRM Software

It isn’t easy to filter and choose the best healthcare CRM for your organization. To that end, our analysts have compiled a list of the top five software solutions that offer the best features to meet the needs of healthcare organizations. Let’s look at each of them.

Salesforce Health Cloud

Salesforce is a leading name in the CRM industry. As one of the biggest cloud-based software providers, Salesforce offers best-in-class healthcare CRM services via Salesforce Health Cloud. It helps all healthcare and life sciences disciplines to unify, secure and access patient information for easy communication.

Organizations can leverage Health Cloud to build stronger relationships and collaborate more intelligently. An easy-to-use interface allows patients to gain real-time connections with healthcare teams. The system lets users access data from multiple sources, including wearables and EHR/EMR platforms, as well as view critical information like patient health records, current medications and appointments.

View of a patient profile in Salesforce Health Cloud.

What Sets It Apart

• Personalized Engagements: Health Cloud makes it easy to connect care teams on a single, secure platform, so doctors are available for their patients, making them feel cared for and connected in times of need.
• Risk Stratification: With predictive analytics, you can identify patients that are at high risk for diseases. You can then proactively manage and cater to those patients with appropriate care management programs.
• Patient Portal: The platform assists in acquiring new patients and provides a comprehensive data view to support existing patients. You can engage with prospects and current patients via communication tools that make their health journey streamlined and easy.
• Workflow Automation: The software allows you to create automated workflows and obtain approval for therapies by integrating it with multiple systems. This capability speeds up approvals and data updates, saving a significant amount of man-hours.
• Care Coordination: The platform simplifies collaborations with a consolidated, real-time view of patient records and gives providers access to important insights that can help them improve their services.

Key Features

• Native Mobile Application: Health Cloud is optimized to work on Salesforce’s mobile app, which is compatible with iOS and Android devices, allowing users to access data without restrictions.
• Account Management and Forecasting: The software helps access a patient’s detailed account history and accurately forecasts the recommended best actions needed. AI functionality helps prioritize sales activities to spot new prospects and close deals.
• Medical Device Sales Dashboard: This feature helps carry out sales initiatives, improves account performance and monitors sales effectiveness based on insights from the software’s data analytics.
• Real-Time Messaging: The platform provides real-time, collaborative messaging for medical professionals, patients, family members and care teams. The feature also allows users to reach out through live chat.
• Patient Portal: With this feature, which includes several associated apps, patients can connect with medical providers in a secure environment. It facilitates sharing of information between doctors and patients across their healthcare journey.

Limitations

• Out-of-the-box integrations are limited.

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Hg Mercury CRM

Since its inception in 2006, Healthgrades has teamed up with more than 1500 hospitals and 400 health systems to build and improve doctor-patient relationships. Hg Mercury CRM provides a platform to build brand recognition and customer loyalty. It also connects healthcare professionals via an online community where they can share knowledge and seek advice from peers.

The software drives engagement and builds trust among health practitioners and their patients with simplified and meaningful inputs such as history records, key trends and performance recording. Intelligent campaign building streamlines marketing efforts and helps convert the leads that are most likely interested in your services.

An analysis tool in Hg Mercury CRM.

What Sets It Apart

• Predictive Models: Access over 500 unique models designed by data science experts based on relevant industry data. View constantly refined data via deep learning networks. You can use these features to uncover health risks.
• Consumer Model: This feature uses demographics to predict health needs of patients and non-patients. It also generates insights on the people in the database that may need medical services.
• Patient Model: The platform uses demographics and medical records to predict patients’ future health risks so you can estimate the likelihood that patients will need medical attention. It takes into account various factors ranging from demographic information and patient encounters to family history.
• Marketing Performance Dashboard: You can plan and evaluate financial impact by measuring success and reach based on campaigns launched through Hg Mercury CRM.
• Hospital Performance Dashboard: The KPI dashboard organizes health systems, patient and encounter data to identify the top-value services that can help acquire new patients.

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Key Features

• Drag-and-Drop Editor: This feature allows you to create customized email campaigns and landing pages with a drag-and-drop tool that’s easy to use.
• Progressive Profiling: The platform allows you to build forms that create fields based on user history. This approach further encourages engagement and increases the chances of higher conversion rates.
• Website Visitor Tracking: You can check insights about site visitors based on pages visited, content downloaded and keywords used.
• Campaign Insights: With a marketing automation integration, you can view campaign analytics and reports, including sales funnels, email metrics, landing pages, forms and website traffic.
• Audience Builder: This feature enables you to create, modify and target small and well-defined audiences for a high return on investment. It also allows communication based on activity and information, such as website visits, previous email interactions, form submissions, audience engagement and CRM data.

Limitations

• Hg Mercury CRM does not offer a free trial.
• There’s no mobile app.
• Healthgrades doesn’t provide an application builder.

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Freshsales

Freshsales is a CRM platform designed to serve any industry. Despite its lack of industry specialization, HIPAA compliance and off-the-shelf tools that support a healthcare environment make Freshsales a good option. An AI-based integration aids lead scoring, contact discoveries and email marketing. It also makes it easy to capture patient activity for a comprehensive understanding of the client journey.

Freshsales helps users track changes in schedules, captures new information and makes the medical history of your patients easily available. As part of the suite of products offered by Freshworks, it can integrate seamlessly with other systems to achieve a fully connected set of business apps.

The deal pipeline view in Freshsales.

What Sets It Apart

• Capture Interactions and Know Patients: The platform unifies records about a patient’s medical history and gives a 360-degree view of their contact details, social media profile, assigned doctor and medical bills. It also provides notes on the side for the staff to type down the symptoms, diagnosis, medication and suitable treatments for future reference. Sync the data with the calendar to make it handy for every doctor-patient conversation.
• Gain Instant Visibility: It’s easy to track the bills of each patient using a visual pipeline that allows you to customize the billing process for each department. Create a dedicated pipeline for doctors to calculate their commissions on each treatment.
• Automate Personalized Communications: Patient engagement is possible through using personalized and informative newsletters. Sales sequences can automatically select recipients based on illnesses, schedule email delivery time and track how marketing collateral is performing to create the perfect outreach for patients. You can also use it to keep patients updated on offers and discounts.
• Automate Daily Tasks: You can boost productivity by automating manual tasks such as sending and confirming appointments, sending emails, generating invoices, and managing patients and related activities, all from one dashboard. The system generates intelligent workflows that are HIPAA compliant.
• Make Data-driven Decisions: Detailed insights on which branch or clinic has the highest number of patient visits and which departments account for the most revenue are available through reports. You can also monitor the amount of revenue each doctor generates.

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Key Features

• 360-degree Customer View: Freshsales provides access to a customer’s social profiles, website, interactions, appointments and much more from one single dashboard to better understand and maintain customer relations.
• Visual Sales Pipeline: This feature helps track deals at every stage of the pipeline. Users can sort and filter deals for a better understanding of the pipeline.
• Lead Scoring: A built-in AI-based lead scoring feature ranks sales leads by using detailed lead data along with effective suggestions. Customization options help sales reps identify and target new leads.
• Custom Reports: Graphical tables and charts let you track sales manager performance, sales figures and other important details. You can schedule reports and send them at specific dates and times.
• Revenue Analytics: The platform provides revenue metrics using multiple criteria, such as per sales rep or territory. With these insights, you can identify successful campaigns, star performers and the most lucrative territories.

Limitations

• Freshsales doesn’t support artificial intelligence for qualifying leads and progressing them through the pipeline.
• Freshsales does not integrate with Google Maps to locate and filter contacts.
• Can’t achieve advanced workflows apart from integration with third-party tools.

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Pega Customer Service for Healthcare

Pega’s Customer Service for Healthcare offering, part of Pega’s underlying CRM suite, delivers AI-powered software with an abundance of capabilities for healthcare organizations. It incorporates elements of Pega’s customer decision hub, marketing tools and sales automation apps.

Customizations deliver healthcare-specific functionality, allowing it to support HIPAA compliance, data models, industry standards, processes and code sets. Pega’s healthcare CRM has a low-code application development platform so companies can more easily engineer it to fit their needs.

Patient insights in Pega Customer Service for Healthcare.

What Sets It Apart

• Chat: A dedicated section on the dashboard allows customer service representatives to interact with customers from the website. It supports starting a conversation with an agent after escalating from a chatbot interaction. Handle chat requests in the order they’re received via omnichannel queue routing capabilities. Routing accounts for agent availability, skillset and the level of the query.
• AI-enhanced Email: AI reads and understands the content of an email, including sentiment, intent and key information. When a user engages with a customer through an email, the AI tool suggests cases and responses for easy communication. It also extracts information from emails into suggested cases, either manually or via AI-highlighted suggestions.
• Cross Channel History: The platform automatically records detailed interaction history to provide context about actions taken for a customer during a particular interaction. It also updates the status and outcome of any service request, as well as provides visibility into self-service actions the customer has taken.
• Customer Verification: Managers can set up tools to verify customers. The feature can work at the start of an interaction as well as when sensitive service requests occur.
• Customer Timeline: This feature provides an intuitive and chronological view of a customer’s journey with reference to every touchpoint. You can see recent interactions and service requests at a glance with drill-down ability for further insight into each case. It supports filtering customer journeys by service, sales or marketing events and can further narrow it down by date range and service request status.

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Key Features

• Interaction Portal: You can better anticipate customer needs with guided, intelligent interactions driven by AI. It also provides context for ongoing or past communication.
• Claims Automation: This feature makes the process of reviewing claims quick and efficient while ensuring correct benefit determinations.
• Self-service Advisor: This feature lets customers on any webpage receive packaged content from Pega Knowledge that could be of help.
• Dashboards and Reports: The software comes with pre-built dashboard widgets and operational reports with the ability to modify and create new dashboards and reports.
• Manager Tools: With a variety of configuration capabilities, you can contact managers to configure and manage the most used features. Details such as behavior and related work, dialogs, coaching tips, knowledge article links, service cases, quality reviews and other capabilities are available.

Limitations

• The integration capabilities are limited.
• Pega Customer Service for Healthcare does not provide an out-of-the-box mobile app. It requires a separate license.

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Influx MD

Influx MD delivers a unified platform consisting of four modules that provide automation for medical sales and marketing tasks to reduce the burden of manual processes. A high degree of flexibility lets you structure funnels, pipelines and workflows to match your processes. With Influx MD, you can accomplish lead generation, email marketing, SMS messaging, video training and more. Features include reports, surveys, quizzes and communication history.

It complies with HIPAA regulations and employs several data security measures to keep your information protected. Scheduling and EHR integration makes carrying out day-to- day medical administrative tasks seamless.

The form building tool in Influx MD.

What Sets It Apart

• Multi-channel Lead Intake: Create behavioral profiles with an array of supporting features to drive, score and grade leads for optimum business performance. The system captures lead information from multiple sources, including online forms, emails, phone tracking systems, Facebook forms, manual entries and data import from other apps.
• One-page Lead Record: With a single page record, you can ensure communication and contact information can be accessed when it’s needed. The lead record provides a real-time view of demographics, communication, automated actions and lead engagement through every stage of the conversion cycle.
• Secure Communication for Medical Leads: Maintain security when communicating with leads to remain in compliance with HIPAA privacy regulations.
• Local Communication Security Monitoring: A customizable security tool offers reminders, activity logging and a variety of access settings. It can also automatically log users out and helps ensure staff only has access to the info they need.
• Secure Website Forms: HIPAA-compliant servers protect contacts, registrations, surveys, quizzes and profile forms. A single short snippet of code generated by the form builder allows the forms to become instantly available to leads. Modifications made in the form are automatically updated wherever the form appears without needing a web developer to make the changes.

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Key Features

• Lead Capture: The system analyzes captured leads to ensure the integrity of the lead database. It matches data entries against existing leads using contact info. You can merge duplicate records to capture any additional submission of information and review closed matches flagged by the platform. Spam filtering eliminates robot form submissions and email spam to maintain database accuracy.
• Real-time Lead Status: Lead records display a real-time custom intake map for each lead captured. This provides an up-to-the-minute view of the whereabouts of the lead and what tasks to perform next.
• Lead Scoring and Grading: The platform provides grading and scoring of leads, which helps in prioritizing leads of high interest. This feature also coordinates email and text communication, as well as gives access to call logs and recordings to help each member of the team engage with sales-ready leads.
• Integrated Email System: Scan thousands of emails per second for sending and tracking them as marketing campaigns. Emails from leads can be extracted and stored in the lead record, providing a complete communication history in one place.
• Private Communication Portal: This feature supports password-protected conversations that provide privacy for communications. It also allows leads and patients to access direct communication with a team through a secure portal.

Limitations

• Tracking and notifications could improve to indicate in advance the list of patients who are close to completing their requirements.
• Out-of-the-box integrations for patient scheduling and EHR/EMR software are limited.
• InfluxMD does not provide a mobile app.

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Final Thoughts

Healthcare CRM software helps in multiple ways, from picking the right prospects to converting them to loyal customers, and can handle many marketing and sales activities on behalf of your institution. Therefore, it’s necessary to choose the right solution for your needs.

Wondering where to start? Our free comparison report offers an in-depth view of CRM systems, and you can tailor it based on your industry and key requirements. This will help you pick a platform that can drive results, attain optimum business growth and satisfy customers.

In what ways can a healthcare CRM make a difference for your organization? Share a comment below to let us know!