Should You Build Your Own Healthcare CRM?
Creating a clinic CRM from scratch has numerous advantages but isn’t feasible for everyone. And on top of that, there are hundreds of great healthcare CRMs: Salesforce Healthcare Cloud, Onpipeline, PlayMaker Health, Healthgrades, Leadaquared, Zendesk, IMS, WelcomeHome, PlanPlus Online, to name a few.
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Why should you invest in a custom solution with so many ready-made CRMs available? There are lots of factors that can influence your build vs buy decision. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s go over the benefits of using a CRM for healthcare providers.
How clinics benefit from CRMs
It’s 2021. Why are caregivers and patients still so poorly connected? It’s certainly time to make technology a real partner for the healthcare industry. Healthcare relationship management software, or simply a CRM, is a step toward bringing together the community of caregivers and improving care across the patient lifecycle.
Specifically, modern CRM software allows healthcare providers to:
- Manage and communicate with clients effectively
- Get real-time visibility into the patient care flow
- Offer a personalized patient experience
- Dive deep into client needs and better understand their satisfaction
- Maintain and track important health information in a single place
- Harmonize data across departments
- Properly assign resources based on resource capacity and availability
- Gain insights into their business performance and understand reasons of poor performance
- Reduce manual work by automating repetitive tasks (and thus reduce human errors)
- Cut down on late patients and no-shows
As for who needs a healthcare CRM, any medical practice can benefit from CRM software including:
- Hospitals
- Retail health clinics
- Urgent care centers
- Outpatient clinics
- Primary care physicians and general practitioners
Do you need to develop a custom healthcare CRM?
Now that you know the benefits of CRM in the healthcare industry, let’s go through the cases when custom clinic CRM development is the best way to go.
#1 You have a lot of employees/departments using a CRM system
Ready made doesn’t always mean cheap. Initially, you won’t have to invest too much to start working with a ready-made CRM. But to use it, you’ll keep paying. Eventually, you may find yourself paying a pretty penny.
Say you’ve chosen the Professional Sales Success plan of PlanPlus Online. If you have 5 employees using it, you’ll spend $1,750 a year. But if you have 20 employees using it, PlanPlus Online will cost you $7,000 every year.
In case you decide to go with Salesforce Health Cloud, you’ll have two different plans to choose from:
- Enterprise: $300 a month per user
- Unlimited: $450 a month per user
If you go with the Enterprise plan, Salesforce will cost you $1,500 every month if you have 5 employees using it. That’s $18,000 a year. Pretty expensive, isn’t it?
Conclusion: If you have a lot of departments and employees, consider custom development. It’ll cost you, but it’s a one-time investment of this size.
#2 You’re ready to invest a considerable amount of money and time in product development
Money and time are one of the most influential factors affecting the buy vs build decision. If you’re a small medical practice that needs a quick solution and has little money, choose from what’s available on the market. There are a lot of off-the-shelf CRM solutions that offer standard functionality at reasonable prices.
Conclusion: A custom CRM might not be the best option for small practices. Don’t go with custom development unless you have all necessary resources including time, money, and people.
#3 You have a unique structure
To get the most out of CRM software, it should fully meet your particular needs. As you’re likely to have unique workflows, it’s reasonable to create your own system. Existing healthcare CRMs typically come with limited functionality that may be insufficient and not suit your specific requirements. This is because ready-made solutions focus on covering the needs of a wide audience, providing basic capabilities.
Conclusion: Choose custom development if you aren’t okay with functionality and design provided by an existing solution.
#4 You don’t want to share data with third parties
Because CRM software stores customer personal data, it’s important to ensure maximum security. Businesses therefore decide to go with custom solutions to keep sensitive information 100% private, safe, and secure.
Conclusion: Choose custom development if sharing sensitive data with third parties isn’t an option and if you want to design your CRM using strong security mechanisms.
Should you build or buy a healthcare CRM?
Using a ready-made CRM or building software from the ground up, what’s right for you? Go through the four variables mentioned above to help you find out:
- Users ― How many employees are going to use a CRM?
- Time & money ― How much will you budget for customer relationship management?
- Design ― Do you want to meet standard CRM needs? Or do you have unique workflows and specific requirements?
- Data security ― Are you okay with sharing information with third parties? Or do you want to keep sensitive data 100% private?
