Future Drivers: 13 CRM Metrics and Key Capabilities of a Reimagined Consumer Journey

Today’s provider organizations face challenges across clinical care, staffing, and shrinking operating margins. Traditional care organizations are also facing a growing surge of consumerism through online empowerment of the individual, increased pressure on care affordability and pricing, and greater competition from retail healthcare entrants such as CVS, Amazon, and a growling list of others.

New CRM technology uses the power of the unified longitudinal patient record to drive a personalized and clinically contextualized 1:1 consumer journey to improve patient experience, business results, and clinical performance. Some may think of 13 as an unlucky number, but for CRM, these are the true CRM value levers in the form of KPIs.

These 13 KPIs roll up to a provider’s strategic objectives, and require crucial capabilities to bridge advanced CRM technology with the power of data readiness . These capabilities help unlock the value of siloed data across an enterprise by aggregating, normalizing, and unifying it into a single, trusted longitudinal patient record. From there, analytics-driven insights help inform, for the individual patient and entire populations, the ability to better engage and communicate with the right message, at the right time, for the right consumer.

Moving From Patient to Consumer

Over the last decade, healthcare organizations have made investments in technology and strategy to get to know their patients better. This has largely come from EHR-based claims and clinical data, patient portals, improved care management—as well as the creation of the digital front door focused on online content, chat capabilities, and virtual care services.

From the growing surge of consumerism across the health system, leading healthcare organizations are recognizing the need for a reimagined consumer journey (RCJ) . This idea combines healthcare-designed CRM technology with the power to capture, normalize, unify, and then activate patient data across the organization. A trusted and well-integrated single-best patient record can, through adoption of data readiness, be acted upon with AI- and ML-based analytics to create insights that inform business segments, workflows, a standalone CRM application, as well as a next-generation experience center

The experience center is a true value-accelerator in the RCJ concept, adding to a standalone CRM solution to include many more engagement points between the provider and the consumer. This steps up the power of data sharing across the enterprise to bridge human contact with better data-related training, which improves responses and engagement with today’s health consumers.

The RCJ supports a number of KPIs—or CRM value levers—that drive “core serum” strategic objectives: the improvement of patient activation to drive revenue, delivering a premium consumer experience, and reducing operational costs. Each of the following 13 KPIs, linked to a standalone CRM solution and/or a CRM-enabled experience center, should roll up to these three objectives.

They include the following:

RCJ KPIs linked to standalone CRM

1. ↑ Increased patient visits
2. ↑ Accelerated appointment conversion
3. ↑ Increased employee productivity
4. ↑ Increased patient retention
5. ↓ Decreased cost per acquisition
6. ↓ Decreased appointment no-shows
7. ↓ Decreased legacy IT expense

RCJ KPIs linked to a CRM-enabled experience center

8. ↑ Increased first-call resolution rate
9. ↑ Increased appointment slot utilization
10. ↓ Reduced post-call unproductive time
11. ↓ Fewer scheduling errors
12. ↓ Lower call center agent onboard time
13. ↓ Reduced average handle time

Capabilities Required

These KPIs are powerful metrics that leading healthcare organizations will use to gain greater performance and results in their marketing and patient experience efforts. However, the ability to improve them arises from a healthcare-centric CRM solution and experience center, connected to and driven by the adoption of data readiness—an end state that results from taking data from myriad systems (EHRs, HIT systems, consumer data, etc.) into a data platform, and then ensuring the data is clean, ultra high quality, accurate, normalized, and aligned with other data in various systems so that it can be acted upon with confidence.

Data readiness drives digital transformation, and requires a data platform and underlying unified data model, such as the Best in KLAS data and analytics platform (DAP) from Innovaccer. The following capabilities are required for, and linked to the 13 CRM metrics:

• Data aggregation: A shared view that reaches the marketing representative, who may be designing the automated follow up for consumer/patient requests that came in through a web form versus a contact center agent.
  
• Automated reporting and dashboards: Speaks to a product suite's ability to serve up data points directly to the end user, so that you don't have to do error-prone, manual data management and reporting.
  
• AI-driven insights: For the patient experience and provider marketing teams, Innovaccer’s CRM solution shows providers how people are responding to messaging. It will then make an informed recommendation for how that next message should go out, whether that's text, phone, or email, to ensure maximal effectiveness.
  
• Referral and scheduling optimization: Having all of the data you need about a single person, nested in a trusted longitudinal patient record, and in the hands of a trained experience center agent, will allow you to get to the right referral and do the scheduling appropriately. For example, you’ll be able to see who the primary care provider is at your fingertips, instead of having to go to another system to look that up, then to go request the referral in yet another system.
  
• Unified view of all touchpoints and interactions : Using the unified longitudinal patient record, including engagement and experience data, AI- and ML-based analytics can create actionable insights that inform the next-best-method communication to the consumer.
  
• Intelligent targeting, personalization, and automation: This allows a high degree of personalization, to each individual, even in an email sent to thousands of patients at a time. By combining the CRM application with the power of unified data, providers can drive a true health 1:1 journey for the consumer.
  

Fig. 1: The Health 1:1 Journey. It starts with a data horizon , a foundation driven by interoperability and a unified data model. Advanced AI and ML analytics, in the process horizon, create powerful workflows to inform agnostic EHRs, applications, and processes. This progresses into a content horizon that creates the right information to drive clinical, financial, and consumer results. And finally, the consumer horizon allows the right content to reach the right individual at the right time.

Future Change Requires Future Thinking

Leading provider organizations are increasingly recognizing the power of data, when unlocked and unified, to inform all types of decisions and enable exceptional outcomes that would otherwise remain elusive. Today’s leaders also increasingly recognize the power to tightly embrace the consumer through more personalized communication with a true 1:1 health journey. This sets the stage to have today’s health systems become true systems of healthcare for individuals and entire populations.

The most advanced CRM technology in today’s healthcare environment recognizes, and takes advantage of, front-end solutions connected with the power to realize the potential and value of data held, and almost always siloed and fragmented, across an enterprise. When unlocked, aggregated, and unified through a single longitudinal patient record, new insights inform decisions through the most advanced set of KPIs for healthcare marketers and patient experience professionals today.

By using the power of these KPIs and capabilities, through a CRM solution connected with a consumer experience center, providers can take a giant step forward in performance and results. The result: Providers can consistently find, guide, and keep patients for life.