HIPAA Compliant Healthcare CRM software

– Your medical marketing department needs it.
– The call center needs it.

You can try being serious about medical marketing with your front desk staff. You will fail. That’s a guarantee. Front desk staff are needed to handle patients and the daily crisis that come up every day while tending to patients. They do NOT have the bandwidth to do marketing for you.

This is a back office responsibility. You need to build or hire a patient contact center center for this. We’ve written about the need for a centralized call center and how to use a healthcare call center software before. Even a healthcare call center cannot operate at maximum productivity without being tied directly and deeply into a HIPAA compliant patient CRM.

We’ve also written about using your EMR to generate more patient appointments. That’s also VERY difficult to do without a healthcare CRM. Healthcare marketing involves phone calls, SMS, faxes – we have written about using proper tools for that because, again, this is a high volume business. It will be really difficult for you to succeed without using a patient texting tool or a faxing tool or a call center software. It becomes a nightmare without these tools.

Your patients are being treated like “kings and queens” by e-commerce companies. They are treated with white glove, personalized service by all vendors out there. That has permanently changed the perception of your patients. The buzz word to describe this is “healthcare consumerization”.

Your patients are now educated consumers. They want to feel valued, treated as an individual.
Healthcare is a high volume business. As long as the current reimbursement model of fee for service exists, healthcare will remain a high volume business.

Even when the transition to value based care and value based payments happens, episodic care volumes will need to transition to preventative care transactional volumes.

How do you handle a high volume business with spreadsheets? Sure, you can get started with spreadsheets, but if you are serious about retaining patients in the long run, you need a regimented approach. You need systems, processes and the tools / technologies to achieve your goals of finding and keeping patients for life.

An EMR merely documents patient care that occurs during a visit. It was never meant to manage patient relationships nor was meant to handle managing relationships at scale.

Nope – that won’t do either. Your practice management software is keeping tabs of your patient demographics, patient insurances and finally your medical billing.
It was not built (back then) to manage patient relationships. Sure, there are many companies that provide you bolt-on systems for patient relationship management, but that’s not their core business.
Practice management systems would be crazy to give up their core business (billing) and compete in the world of relationship management.

To some extent, but not really. Patient portal usage and adoption is pathetically low. While the patient portal numbers reported across the world sound high, the reality is that those numbers are just reporting patient portal activation.
Not real patient portal usage.
Look into your own practice. What % of your patients are actually managing their relationship with you using the patient portal?

Before you are able to get better at patient relationships, you need to actually understand the patient. Before you fully understand your patients, you actually need a 360 degree view of the patient. To get a 360 degree view of the patient, you need to put the various “parts” of a patient into one view.

Here are a just a few things you can do with a healthcare CRM:
Patients
Get a 360 degree view / holistic view of the patient
Understand who the patient really is
Where they came from (how they found you)
Understand what the patient’s demographics are
Your patient’s social life and context
Understand the health conditions the patient has
How the patient engages with your practice
Understand what has their satisfaction with your practice has been
Their financial responsibilities towards your practice
Understand their accountability behavior
Personalize all communications with the patient
Help you understand how to retain the patient
Understand the patient’s family and treat them as a family
Help you understand the care team of the patient
Be able to segment patients based on clinical information
Segment patients based on demographic information
Be able to segment patients based on insurance information
Segment patients and create look alike patients to market to
Be able to segment patients and perform clinical risk analysis
Segment patients and perform financial risk analysis
So much more towards personalized care that the patient needs to stay loyal to your healthcare organization.

Referring providers:
Understand your relationship with your referring provider
Find out who else could be a referring provider and target them to get referrals
Understand whether your referring provider is splitting referrals between you and your competitors.
Keep your referring provider happy about the business they are sending you.
Capture new referring provider sources even if the patient came in without a referral.
Build a tight referral network to enhance patient care.
Move your patients within your high performing referral network.
Launch and manage co-management programs.
So much more!

It’s not to say that you cannot achieve the same with spreadsheets. You can. We have already shared quite a few of these spreadsheets in other articles. You can very well get started with those spreadsheets. However, if you want a true 360 degree / complete view of the patient to truly be able to serve them and to be able to generate more business from these patients, we urge you to consider a healthcare CRM software.

Does your patient portal, your EMR or your EPM give you that? Nope.

That’s what a healthcare CRM software does for you. It presents the data that you already have, across multiple systems into a single, wholistic view. Once you have that 360 degree view of your patient, you can truly slice and dice your patient data to start understanding them and serving them better.

When you want to grow your healthcare business.

Simply put – if you are investing time and money into marketing, you need a patient CRM software (and possibly a provider CRM software as well). You can achieve the same using spreadsheets as well. However, managing patient relationships using spreadsheets only adds to manual data entry overheads.

You need a HIPAA compliant healthcare CRM software if you are investing time and money in any of these:
Paid ads (Facebook, Google etc)
SEO (your website)
Sending patient satisfaction surveys
Marketing new services to patients (e.g. telemedicine line of service)
Using patient education to retain patients
Increasing patient volumes by calling patients that never showed up
Increasing patient appointments by recalling patients
Increasing patient visit volume by reappointing no shows
Asking patients for referrals
Marketing for physician referrals via physician liaisons
Marketing for physician referrals via faxes or phone calls
Marketing to neighboring communities via cold calls or postcards
Print and media advertising (newspapers, radio, TV).

You’d think so. These days – they are not. Patients do switch healthcare providers.

You need to cement your relationships with your patients. In a survey, nearly sixty percent of patients that responded stated that they would switch providers for quality or service reasons; whereas fewer than one-quarter of the doctors that responded felt that a patient would switch providers for those reasons.

The study’s results also showed that there was a disconnect between how satisfied that providers thought their patients were – they estimated that roughly three-fourths of patients were satisfied; whereas, patients themselves, when asked, stated a satisfaction of roughly forty percent.

The increasing consumerization of healthcare along with the strong disconnect between providers’ perception of a patient’s willingness to switch providers and their overall satisfaction indicates that there is a gap that is currently not being filled with existing patient management tools.

Think again. Patients are being marketed to digitally.

There’s no getting around this. Ask yourself – what do YOU do when you see that something on Amazon.com is not available to be shipped for 15 days from now? Do you order it and wait? Or do you simply move to the next vendor?

That’s exactly what patients are doing to you.

It’s great to add new patients to your practice each month, but keep in mind that repeat patients typically make up 80% of your business. The more you lose patients, the more marketing dollars you have to spend in acquiring new patients.

Net-net : If you want to remain competitive, invest in improving patient access and certainly start investing heavily in patient relationship management.

Think about how ecommerce vendors treat you. They:
– Wish you happy birthday
– Wish you various seasonal greetings
– Send you relevant articles or blog posts to read once you purchase something
– Send you timely offers
– Greet you with your name when you login to their website or mobile app
– Remember your account and credit card information so you don’t have to remember them each time
– Allow you to interact with their brand 24×7
– Provide stellar customer service each time you contact them
– Send you regular updates when you purchase something
– Keep you in the loop about the status of an inquiry or purchase
– Ask you how satisfied you were with each transaction you make
– Make it SUPER easy for you to do business with them
– Make recommendations based on your past purchases or interests
– So on and so forth.

That’s what you have come to expect from your favorite e-commerce vendor. That’s also why you are loyal to your e-commerce vendor… because they invested in you.

Do you invest in your patients? Do you invest in your referring providers?

Time to get started is NOW.

Patients are not as loyal as they used to be. They are bearing a higher percentage of their healthcare costs. Being educated consumers, they are shopping around for the highest value for their healthcare dollars. If you do not invest heavily into patient relationships, you will certainly see dwindling patient volumes.

Patients are also looking for doctors with highest levels of patient access. If it takes weeks to get an appointment with you, you are pretty soon going to lose patients.

In the past, doctors and patients used to have a very personal relationship. Patients did not switch doctors very easily and the doctors knew their patients, their families by name. There were much more solo practitioners and the volume of patients seen by a single solo practice wasn’t high.

A CRM software for healthcare was not needed back then. That’s no longer the case.

Your EMR has patient demographics, patient insurance, clinical data like allergies, vitals, medications, HPI, immunizations, consent forms etc.
That’s a massive amount of information that your front desk and techs have to enter into your EMR. The demographics data is entered by the front desk and the clinical data is entered by the techs.
The insurance, ID proof and consent forms on the other hand are the simply scanned and attached to your EMR as “documents”.
Digital patient intake software allows you to offload this overhead of data entry to patients themselves. Who else knows their data better?
Patients are entering a lot of this information when they sit in your waiting room anyway. You might as well have them fill these out electronically so that this information goes directly into the EMR and your staff is relieved of this task.

If you use digital patient intake forms, the majority of your daily tasks can be moved to the patient side.
They can fill out their demographics, insurance, medical history, medication history, chief complaint, history of present illness etc at the comfort of their homes.
This allows the patient enough time to provide you the correct information, and allows patients to be prepared for the visit.
This also reduces the time spent by technicians “working up” patients.
The patient no longer has to spend a long time in the waiting room, thereby is extremely satisfied with the visit.

If you truly make changes to your patient intake process as suggested above, you can expect immediate productivity gains like:
– Limited number of front desk staff you need to check in patients
– Reduced time spent by front desk staff on each patient
– Limited data entry errors by front desk staff
– Allows you to collect patient copays via credit cards – more importantly, have their card on file
– Reduced time spent by your techs on entering patient data
– Capture correct demographic, insurance and contact information from patients
– Keep patients busy and reduces the wait times for patients

– Appointment scheduling. The software can allow patients to self schedule appointment requests. Then, if you want, your front desk can confirm those appointments.
– Reminders (e.g. Appointment reminders). The software can send automated appointment reminder text messages and voicemails.
Checkin
– Patient check in. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Demographics data. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Verification of patient’s identity. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
Histories
– Chief complaint. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– History of present illness. Ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Patient’s medical history. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Family history. Ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Patient’s surgical history. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Social history. Ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Patient’s allergy list. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Medication list. Ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Various HIPAA and consent forms signed by the patient. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
Insurance
– Insurance details of the patient. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Photos of Insurance cards. Ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Eligibility checks for coinsurance, deductible details. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit. This allows you to check these details electronically (before the visit), provide estimated cost of care- include coinsurance and deductibles in calculation(s)
Other info
– Referral information. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– Patient’s care team info. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.
– CCD record of patient from care team physicians. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit. The cool thing is this allows to to send automated CCD request faxes to care team before patient visit. Once you receive and send CCDs electronically, you get better scores for MIPS 🙂
Payments
– Payment details – You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit. This has tremendous benefits of allowing to you to start a “Credit card on file” program at y9ur office.
– Patient reported outcomes. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit. This alone will help your technicians cut down the time they spend on each patient (a good 5-10 mins per patient)
– Pharmacy of choice. You can ask patients to complete at home, before their visit.

– Patient recall appt date/time. Ask patient to choose the same way as this appt
– Copay / balance dues. Ask patient to pay at home or before seeing doctor using credit card on file

– Patient satisfaction surveys. Send automated SMS / email
– Recalls
– Patient balance dues. Send automated SMS / email. Ask patient to pay using credit card on file
– Education materials.
– Patient statement
– Re-appointing no-show patients
– Re-appointment of cancelled patients
– Stay in touch messages / greetings

Migrating a significant proportion of patient check-ins to digital/online form frees up quite a bit of the front desk staff’s time to engage in more value-added activities.
For example, instead of having to check in self-sufficient patients, you can spend time with complicated patients that may need assistance.
You can reduce the hold times that patients currently have when calling for assistance or appointment scheduling.
For example, you can guide established patients with certain diagnoses through certain forms to complete.
Meanwhile, you can guide new patients through a different set of forms.
These are items that are easy for overburdened front desk staff to miss. If these tasks are pushed to an MA or nurse in an exam room, it interrupts the flow of other patients through the practice.
If you are handling these at check-in keeps the patient flow streamlined and reduces the chance for errors to occur.
If you connect to your EMR to our patient intake software, check-in kiosks also can link this information to discrete data in the patient’s record.
Another example, if your patient completes a Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) 2/9 online, that data can then populate the correct section of the EMR.
If the patient corrects their demographic information in the kiosk, it can, likewise, correct the practice management system.
One of the biggest challenges and source of inaccurate clinical data & billing errors stems from the fact that healthcare practice staff are never clinically trained.
So, now you can have your staff perform other more personalized tasks instead of inputting data from the intake forms to your EMR/EPM.

Our patient intake form software can also validate a patient’s insurance information before the patient even steps into your practice.
Not only can our software validate insurance information at the time the appointment is made by the patient – your staff can also run a sanity check on the day before or day of the visit.
Billing
Many billing problems occur due to inconsistencies between plans you participate in and the insurance plan the patient carries.
Other billing issues occur due to variances in patient’s address, the plan name, the member ID, the patient’s address, their primary care physician name etc
Our digital patient intake form software platform can not only validate the insurance information but can also check into a patient’s eligibility.
Any time prior authorizations are required, your care team can be alerted about the same. The patient can also be automatically kept in the loop to ensure that all such prerequisites are taken care of, before the visit itself.
Patient identity
Even patient identities can be verified online by our software. This avoids patient identity fraud is a big problem and usually leads to fines being levied on practices.
Most practices handle this situation by asking the patient to come in with a proof of identification. This is OK to do – however, if the identification fails, you have lost a time slot that could have been filled by a different patient.
We can easily scan the photo IDs of patients and verify them in real time. The software can also take pictures/scan the insurance IDs, read the data on those cards and verify insurance eligibility in real time.
All the various headaches your front desk has are taken care of. They can now manage patient flow in the offices.
Imagine what this does for your billing department and how it contributes to your revenue cycle management processes !

A majority of the practices we work with, do not even keep credit cards on file.
This allows patients to not show up whenever they want – leaving you with a loss of revenues.
Each time a patient makes an appointment, they should be asked to keep a credit card on file so that you can at least “warn” them with the prospect of charging their card for a missed appointment.
Patients do not like being charged for a missed appointment, but if you do it once, they will reduce their recurring “no-show” behavior. Probably the most important part of our patient intake software platform is the ability to directly impact your invoicing and collections abilities.
Collect payments
We can collect payments up front and also to collect remaining balances with patient’s approvals.
Most patients (no matter what their demographics are) are already used to these technologies in their everyday lives. They pay for things online (don’t let them tell you otherwise). With a click of a button or on a pre-set agreement, they pay your past dues online, without the vendor having to chase them down for collecting payments.
It’s as simple as collecting a patient’s credit card or preferred payment method online during the patient intake process, having them pay their copay before you see them (you know your notices of “payment is due at time of service”? This is an easy way to ensure that you really get paid – for sure).
Reduce no shows
You could even reduce no-shows and ensure that patients come in for their time slot by making them pay their copay before they step in the door. Now, for the matter of balance due payments. It’s very simple as well. During the patient intake process, while you collect the credit card or debit card or bank information from patients, you simply have to get patients to agree that this same payment method would be used for paying balance dues.
That’s it. Let patients opt-in for this process and you are done. Half your billing and payment collection headaches are taken care of.

You will see higher patient reviews – just based on reduced patient wait times.
Typically, your doctors are pretty fast – however, techs need a lot of time to enter all patient data into the EMR so that it is documented as needed (for doctors and for payers).
On top of this, most patients never remember all their medication information anyway, so, no matter what you do – your techs are never really capturing 100% accurate information.
This increases the time it takes to work up a patient. Which, in turn, increases the wait times for other patients.
When patients are asked to fill out their medication, history of present illness, social history etc from the security and comfort of their homes, expect to collect accurate information and expect your patient wait times to reduce and your workflow to speed up.
More than 90% of bad reviews occur due to long wait times (which leads to patient dissatisfaction, ornery patients and staff).
Once you decrease your patient wait times and reduced front desk load, you will automatically see better patient reviews.

We had the same questions. In fact our patient contact center team tried it out with our ophthalmology patients (mostly older than 40). This works like a charm and patients truly appreciated not having to wait much in the offices.
In fact, some research has found that a not insignificant number of patients have even at least partly based their decision on what provider to seek care from based on the availability of self-service options. The same research found that a significant number of patients were interested in self-service options..

Yes, it can. It all starts with sending a link to the patient with your intake website. We recommend that you combine all patient intake channels. Take a moment and list all the ways you get patients (and patient appointments).
– Patients request appointments on your website
– Patients call in and request appointments
– Referring providers call and request appointments for their patients
– Referring providers send new patient appointment requests using some patient referral software
– Patients request appointments on Facebook
– Patients request appointments via ZocDoc
Set up all these channels to respond with an automated message with a link to EzHealthcareCRM. Think through the patient intake process – what you really need in the first patient contact.
1. Minimum patient information you need to be able to create a patient in the EMR
2. Minimum information you need to be able to create an appointment in the EMR

Everything else can be gathered later on – before the patient comes in (pre-visit) and when the patient is at the practice (during visit). That’s how our patient contact center ensures minimal disruption and lowers the chances of patients not requesting an appointment.

Yes it can. It’s almost the same as the with new patients. The only difference is that you already have information on the patient before they request an appointment. There are two ways this can be achieved.
1. Using EzHealthcareCRM standalone with patient data that you upload via CSV
2. EMR integration that automatically looks up patient information.

Our patient contact center team ensures that your intake process remains the same as much as possible. When a patient calls in for an appointment, our customers’ front desk or call center agents use the same patient intake screens / web pages. They do so on the patient’s behalf. This helps them take the patient intake to a point where the appointment is created in the EMR and thereafter, the SMS conversations begin. You can, however, choose to have two separate processes as well.

Even for this, our patient contact center team follows the same process. Sometimes, however, the provider office does not have the patient’s preferred times / days of appointments. In those cases, our patient contact center team gives the calling provider office an appointment 2 weeks out. You can choose to do the same or design your own process as well. Meanwhile, the patient gets a text message or a voicemail drop with the appointment they have been given.

Almost the same process as above. If ZocDoc is connected directly to your EMR, then the patient and appointments will show up there anyway. If your EMR is connected to EzHealthcareCRM, then the patients would experience the same digital patient checkin process as any other patient.

One good thing about these two platforms is that they allow you to send an automated response to the patient. This is where you introduce the appointment form in the automated message. In this automated response, you can have the patient start they intake process as if they’re calling in or going to your website to request an appointment 

Yes! It’s just a website. Anyone or any device that has access to the internet can access the software

Healthcare Referral Management Software is (usually) a software that allows you to manage all incoming or outgoing medical referrals you receive or send to other practices. Think of it as the spreadsheet you might be currently using to manage healthcare referrals you send / receive. This is a software version of your spreadsheet – just smarter, easier to use, manage, track etc.

At face value, healthcare referral management software helps you track, manage, report on medical referrals easier. At a minimum, understand that. If you look deeper, such software helps you become adept at medical marketing.

Medical providers and staff do not can grow your medical practice tremendously using a physician referral management software. We have covered this in our medical practice marketing course as well. 

Typically, the inbound team in our centralized call center gets referrals in one of the following ways. These are the ways that you typically would receive referrals.
– Physician referrals from an inbound call from the referring provider office.
– Patients call in with a referral from one of our referring partners.
– Provider offices faxing us a patient referral written on a referral pad.
– Provider offices faxing us a patient referral that’s a print out of the referral + patient record from their EMR
– Provider offices sending us referrals via 3rd party referral management software like Referwell, par80, Werq, ReferralMD and jointhenetwork/P2P.
– Provider offices send referrals using our customers’ websites

Take a look at the various channels you are going to have to manage.
1. Phone (patients calling or referring providers calling with a referred patient)
2. Your website (that will send you an email)
3. Third party websites for referrals
4. Faxes (referrals come in via faxes from providers or providers’ EMRs)
5. Email

You can take any of the approaches we have mentioned in our medical marketing course. We have found payer provider directories to be the most reliable data. Our healthcare referrals software includes provider databases already. This database is growing daily as more and more providers are identified and added to the system. Once a provider and their practice(s) are identified, they are added the system for everyone to use.

Search for a referring provider that you want to reach out to. Once you find the provider in EzMedicalReferrals, click on the phone, fax or email button to contact them. In our experience, we recommend that you do not depend on a single channel. The outreach channels you have at your disposal are FAX, EMAIL, PHONE CALLS, IN PERSON VISITS, POSTAL MAIL/LETTERS.

To market via fax, all you have to do is to create a simple one-sheeter marketing material (hopefully your office already has one). Once you have your PDF ready to use, upload it to our software.

Our software assigns you one fax number as soon as you sign up. When you send a fax, it will show up in your “Faxes” tab, in the “Sent” tab.

We recommend sending exactly 2 faxes per month per practice to advertise yourselves. Do not overdo this.

If you prefer to mail (it does get expensive) postcards, use the same one sheeter marketing material you have and mail it via post. You can use sites like uprinting.com, usps bulk mail option as well. We recommend sending 1 postcard per month (not twice a month) as this is a slightly more expensive option.

If you decide to send postcards, please make sure that you update the practice record, “Activity” data with “Sent fax”.

Search for the practice you want to call, click on the Call button. You do not need a landline to call the practice as you can call using your web browser as well. If you call using your desk phone, please remember to update the practice record, “Activity” data with “Called”.

Regardless of sending faxes and postal mail, you need to be calling these offices. We generally recommend making exactly 2 calls per month on a schedule. Keep in mind that all you have to do is to send the faxes each day to your daily list, then make those calls. This way, people can connect your call to the received fax.

Yes! And we recommend that you do so regularly. This is a very interesting part – you need to keep building your database of contacts. For every office you speak to or visit, you need to add/contribute to your database of contacts. Keep in mind that when you create your database for the first time, you will only have provider information. 

As soon as you start your outreach, you are going to come in contact with the actual staff members that would be responsible for sending you referrals. 

You need to add the names, direct phone numbers, fax numbers / extensions to your database. Slowly, over weeks, you will find that your physician database starts growing with relevant contacts for each practice (account).

Make sure that you don’t create a separate spreadsheet of notepad entry for the added contacts. This is where things fall off the planet – data entry that is outside the database. Most practices that we work with, fail here.. In the ability and the rigor of keeping data consolidated, for it to make sense and add value.

Always, always, add data to the same database that you are working off of.
Your personal contacts are not shared with anyone else using our software. Those belong to you only.

When the patient uses this website from the SMS itself, they are obviously on the mobile phone. They can very easily take a picture of their insurance card (front and back) to update their information as well

After this, the patient is given an option to call the practice or send SMS to the practice.

First things first, upload the visit note to the referral you received. After that, you can choose to notify your referring provider. Your referring provider might expect you to send a fax back with the consult notes. You can opt to do that right from the notify button.

Do what you were already doing. Process the referral by calling the patient and setting up an appointment. There will be times when a referring provider might not be using the system. No problem. You can still manage and track your referrals using our software.

You can create a referral update with basic patient details (mainly MRN, patient name, DOB) and send a referral update like you did before.

The referral sender will get a fax with your patient update and can choose to use our software or continue using faxes. It doesn’t matter – they will get their referral update and visit notes regardless of how they choose to work.

Yes, in fact that’s a neat little trick to increase your referral base. Let’s say that you had a patient come in without a referral. Of course, your office captured the patient’s primary care physician information.

Use this to your advantage. Always monitor each patient appointment for their primary care physician and also their referring physician.

If you have patients with no referring physician, then look for the primary physician information. Once you get this PCP name/information, you can then open the door with them by sending them a visit note proactively. 

The best way to do this is to fax them the patient visit notes, then visit them to open the relationship further. Do this for the first few times to ensure that your referring physician understands your commitment to closing the referral loop (even though they really did not send you a referral). After a few times of doing this proactively, you will notice that their office starts sending your practice referrals proactively.

Go to the list of referrals you have. Hopefully you have created saved searches for each provider office. This way, when you call, text, email or fax a referring provider office, you will have all their referrals right in front of your eyes.

2. You can also choose to download a list of all referrals received last week / this week / this month (whatever you decide) as a spreadsheet from our software.

3. Sort this list by referring partner name so you know that you’re calling a partner only once a week

4. Note the total referrals they sent the week before last week. You’re going to need this Info to determine whether they’re sending lesser referrals over weeks.

5. Call referring partners, speak to the front desk and ask for the person that sent the referral. If you’re connected with them immediately, talk to the person. Thank them for the referrals last week, ask them if there’s anything that they want your operations team to do, capture the feedback in our software.

6. If there’s a drop in weekly referrals, ask them if they’re happy with your service or not.

8. If there are any issues they report, add that info on the notes section because you’ll have to send an email to operations team to fix that issue

9. Tell them that you’re going to send them a fax after the call with their patient reports/status. After the call, send them via fax using the fax button. To send a fax, you just filter the referrals list for the practice you’re talking to, export as PDF and send the fax via the fax button.

10. If you can manage them to agree to set up a recurring weekly meeting with you for 15 mins, do it. This is important, makes your job easier and the relationship gets stronger.

11. If you’re asked to call back, ask for the name of referral person, number/extension – enter it in notes section, add a reminder to call back at date/time in spreadsheet and your google calendar

12. At the end of the day, add all new people you discovered into your referring partner contact database in the our software software itself.

13. If you miss connecting with a practice one week, it’s OK. Make sure you connect with the practice next week by adding these missed practices to next week’s call sheet

HIPAA Security – that’s it.

If you are creating only a database of doctors, practices, the insurances they accept – then you do not really need HIPAA security per se. You can use ANY of the 100s of CRMs out there in the market. 

However, in healthcare, you need to cannot deal with only provider, practice and insurance data. You need to have some patient data as well.

You will notice that your team does have to answer patient related queries – e.g. Hey, patient name xxxx yyyy DOB xx/yy/zzzz – can I get an appt please? Can I have the note please .. etc
You can very easily have a standalone provider CRM that’s non HIPAA compliant and when you need to address any patient related queries, you switch to another application, find the patient, their consult note etc and respond back.

However, this is where the headaches begin – data is not tied together, there’s no way to trace the patient pathway from outside to within your practice. This is where traditional CRMs break down – they are not integrated with your EMR or EPM, not integrated with your contact center software, not integrated with patient intake software etc.. and you need them all to work together.

Make sure that whatever physician referral management solution you choose, it has HIPAA security as top of mind. Make sure that PHI is protected and the vendor is willing to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). We will gladly sign a BAA.

You are obviously going to need authentication. That’s a standard across all web or mobile applications these days. However, you are going to need to take a few extra steps here that might help you with HIPAA security a bit more.

Your employees will, in all probability, be working from your offices or remotely. If they work from your offices, you can lock down PHI even further by disallowing access to the website or mobile apps outside of office hours (e.g. 9 AM to 6 PM EST).

If they work remotely but work from an outsourced office, you can follow the same timing steps and disallow access to the website / mobile app outside of those working hours.

The biggest challenge with PHI and HIPAA is that your staff might download or leak the patient data. This is the biggest protection you need.

Yes – we have the concept of users and teams. Once one of you has signed up, you can invite your colleague to “My Team”.. meaning they can see all your referrals. Or, you can invite a referring partner to “Partner Team”.. meaning they can only see the referrals you share with them.

You have the ability to define teams. Typically, what we have seen is that the appointment setting team needs to work on a volume basis (i.e high number of calls, faxes, emails etc) while the physician liaisons work on a lower volume of records.

The ability to create teams becomes very important when you want to assign a group of patients, providers, accounts (practices) to a team of individuals – to further limit overwhelming them. 

This way, you can create a team with inside sales reps (i.e. appointment setting team) that handles 1,000 practices. This team can generate appointments and pass on the accounts to the physician liaison team only after they have made contact with the practice staff. This way, each team can be laser focused on their own tasks.

Simple – enter your NPI and we will do the rest. If you do not know the NPI number of your practice, you can still type in the details and we will fetch whatever we can get from CMS NPPES database.

Absolutely! You (or your sales manager) needs to be able to create territories and distribute accounts within that territory to specific team members. As an example, you could have a team of 5 field sales reps handling NYC. Each rep could have their territory consist of a borough – e.g. Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens etc.

Meanwhile, the appointment setting team could have all of NYC as their territory. Sometimes, reps might share a region/zone based on how large a zone / area is – you might have situations wherein two reps have overlap of zones. Instead of being in a situation where the efforts are duplicated by the physician liaisons going to the same accounts on different days, it is better to separate territories entirely.

This, in our mind, is the most important and fun capability that our physician referrals software allows you to do. You can create saved searches based on anything you want – insurances, specialties, zip codes, referring partners etc.

As you can guess, your physician liaison team is going to:
– Segregate their accounts on some factor – e.g. insurance or zip code or specialty
– Slice and dice the provider data to create outreach lists or account management (existing referring partner) list
Each day, as more and more providers are added to your database system, your team would not want to repeat their steps. They would expect more and more data to be added to their saved searches. Each day, as they get in touch with more and more offices, they would expect that their lists also get automatically updated.

As you can imagine, your referral coordinator team is going to create saved searches based on referring provider, status of referrals etc. You can do all that in our software

s you know or probably realize, field sales is a different ball game altogether. This requires spending a lot of time on the road, finding parking, double parking (at times), teaming up with another field sales rep that sits in the car while the other person visits the office, waiting at doctors’ offices to be seen in between patient appointments.

As a marketing manager, you want to pay for results – not for your reps driving around nor for looking for parking. EzMedicalReferrals healthcare referrals software allows your physician liaisons to be able to plan their day, plan the route they are going to take, the practices they are going to visit.

Our software shows all the practice locations on a map. Your physician liaisons can create / view and manage their entire day’s route (which location are they starting from, where they are going to next, what route to take etc). We use Google maps do route optimizations for you.

The most hated part of your job is to have to constantly report to your manager about what you did the entire day.

Our software allows you to be able to send emails, send faxes, make calls, log visits at various practice locations – all part of their daily activities.. Directly from the software.

When a user performs any of these activities, our referrals software automatically logs this information instead of forcing you to enter all data manually.

As a manager, you can very easily view all the activities of your team, guide them better, manage and plan their future activities as well.

You can add a note to almost every record in the software – provider, practice, patient, referral .. everything.

You and your team/ staff can take copious notes in each account/provider/contact record within our application.  This becomes very important as healthcare staff seem to share very important information about doctors’ schedules , type of patients they see, whether they have specific equipment in the office, whether they accept certain plans or not etc. 

Your team needs to save this information – these are very important to further dig into the account. As always, you will find that patient records will need the ability to add notes as well (e.g. patient said …. Or staff mentioned that this patient… ) .. specifically about items that do not belong in the EMR.

Just what they say – reminders.. To remind you of doing something in the future 🙂 You can set up reminders to remind you via email or by sending a text to your cell phone.

That’s up to you.

Reminders are tightly tied with tasks. Think of reminders as todos with a due date.

These are just TODOs that you can create for yourself or someone on your team can create for you.

Almost each time that you or your staff interacts with another practice (target referring provider), they are going to have tasks assigned to someone else in the practice. e.g.

– Add a new contact to the physician database / CRM
– Add new provider that was discovered during outreach
– Referring provider office complained about something – ask the medical staff to follow up with them
– Referring provider office wants referral pads delivered – ask the office procurement staff (or the admin) to order and deliver referral pads
– Referring provider wants the patient’s visit notes – ask the techs/providers to follow up and send the notes.
– While on call, the referring partner sent a referral – create that patient appointment and referral in the EMR
– Referring provider office wants a copy of your marketing material or your new service offering – ask the admin to create one and send it along.

This is something very useful. You have a list of TODOs / tasks. You can only do so many in one day. What you can do with EzMedicalReferrals is – create a task queue any way you want. This way, you don’t have to think much about the order of the tasks. You can simply start the task queue, handle each task, move on to the next one.

Think of it like a call sheet for call centers. They have a list of patients to call and appoint/remind/reschedule/reappoint etc. They just go through the entire list, finish as much as they can each day and keep working on it the next day.

Physician liaisons can also use the task queues like that. Here’s an example:

1. Create a filter of practices they want to target (e.g. Bronx, primary care physicians)

2. Start the day with running the task that just prompts them to make the calls, add notes/contacts/providers during the call

3. Create or use an optimized route for these accounts

4. Go visit these accounts while checking in at each place, taking notes etc.

5. Go to the next step in the task queue. Keep working until the day is over

Next day, they don’t go around hunting for who to target, what to do next – they simply continue with the task queue .. rinse, repeat, until done.