From Top-of-Funnel Outreach to Ongoing Care: Why CRM is Needed for Virtual Care

Digital communication is the lifeblood of most virtual care businesses. Companies need to continually have new patients sign up while having good outcomes and strong retention for those who join.

However, tracking and managing the end-to-end experience for outreach to prospective leads while providing ongoing care typically presents challenges for many businesses.

In this blog, we hope to illustrate the common pitfalls companies fall into and potential solutions for how to better manage this entire process.

1. Diverse Communication Needs: Virtual care demands different messaging strategies for prospective patients and those receiving care, including varying communication mediums like marketing emails and SMS for top-of-funnel and secure chat for existing patients.

2. EHRs Unsuitable for Patient Communication: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) aren’t designed for managing ongoing patient care; they are typically used for acute care.

3. Segmentation Challenges: Having to manage top-of-funnel “leads” and “patients” in separate places creates an awkward transition and hand-off when someone converts from “lead” to “patient”.

4. One or the Other: Many existing tools either lack marketing automation capabilities needed for top-of-funnel outreach or clinical workflows for care management, making them less effective for seamless patient management.

5. HIPAA Compliance: If the CRM being used is not HIPAA-compliant, it limits the scope of what businesses can use it for, and introduces design constraints. For example, if a business were to use HubSpot they’d only be able to use it for marketing and would have to ensure no PHI is stored in the system.

6. Integration Woes: Most generalized CRMs don't integrate well with a company's EHR, leading to disjointed data.

7. Patient Tracking Difficulty: Keeping tabs on where a lead or a patient is at in their journey is a struggle, often resulting in manual, error-prone methods like spreadsheets.

8. Scalability Concerns: Patient engagement and retention are tough to scale without an organized and automated system. Using an unscalable solution often leads to communication gaps which cause unsatisfied patients, poor outcomes, and lost revenue opportunities.

1. Patchwork Approaches: Piecing together spreadsheets and multiple communication tools with an EHR may provide the “raw features” that your business needs, but it often leads to unscalable processes and incomplete understanding of every patient.

2. Building in-house: Building a homegrown platform requires a lot of time and resources upfront and takes a while to have a viable solution in place. Once something is stood up, there are recurring costs for product maintenance and bug fixes which can affect business operations.

3. Complex Enterprise CRM: Implementing and customizing an enterprise CRM can take a significant amount of time and money and is often an impractical option for SMBs.

4. HIPAA-Compliant and Non-Compliant Mix: Combining a non-HIPAA compliant CRM for top-of-funnel with a HIPAA-compliant platform for ongoing care creates issues around continuity of care, smooth handoffs, and data integrity.

5. Entirely Outsourcing Certain Business Operations: Completely outsourcing all marketing and outreach to top-of-funnel leads or for care management sacrifices insight and control. With marketing especially, this has been a hot issue with the enforcement against healthcare businesses incorrectly using Pixels and Website Trackers. [1] 

1. Pipeline Management: A centralized system to manage both patient leads and active patients. 

2. Marketing Automation: Ability to create automated campaigns for reaching prospective patients and proactively engaging existing patients to ensure patient retention. 

3. Care Management: Empowering care teams to efficiently manage patients post-enrollment.

4. EHR Integration: Seamless integration with EHR systems for comprehensive patient records.

5. Centralized Communication: Housing all communication channels in one secure platform.

6. Role-Based Access: Enabling different team members and departments to work within one platform while only being able to access information for what their role necessitates, ensuring patient privacy.

Tellescope’s HIPAA-compliant CRM is designed specifically for virtual care businesses. Companies have used Tellescope to seamlessly scale from dozens to thousands of patients per month.

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