For non-profit organizations, like nursing homes, donations can be an important revenue source.  The problem with most funding or donor management software out there today is the inability to integrate with a financial management system.  By using Microsoft Dynamics CRM you can create a closed loop system by being able to market to the potential donor, forecasting the donation and collecting and reporting on it in your financial management system (Microsoft Dynamics GP).  This can also be reported on with other financial data in a consolidated format.

For a while now I have been debating whether or not there would be a use for an integrated electronic medical record (EMR) and a customer relationship management system. To further understand the problem you first have to define EMR and CRM. An EMR is a system that allows physicians and staff the ability to document patient encounters, streamline workflow and share information to appropriate parties like other physicians or staff. CRM allows marketing, sales and customer service staff the ability to track customer encounters, streamline sales and customer service processes and share information to individuals and managers.  View full story here.

Cornerstone Client Featured at Launch Event

 Microsoft CRM 4.0 Launch Event

Managing patient care is of utmost importance to hospital administration.  From reviewing most of the clinical based software in the market there really isn’t any solution out there that focuses on customer patient care.  A solution like this would manage non clinical data points.  An example would be a survey that focuses on how the patient rates service not regulatory efficiency.  This would be load into CRM from the web or from a form patients could fill out.  This data would help, from a non-clinical perspective, improve quality of care.

Microsoft has launched the new Dynamics site.  Currently, the site only gives information about Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Communities.  The new micro-site is a great idea and allows information about the Microsoft Dynamics products to be viewed and distributed in a cleaner more organized way.

The site contains a community feature that allows you to sign up and create an account to network and collaborate on the uses of CRM.  The community also has events, articles, forums and blogs that can be used as an educational tool on how to use CRM more efficiently.

Click here to visit the site and sign up for your free account.

Improve customer service and marketing with CRM. For some reason customer relationship management or CRM software is sometimes confused with sales force automation (SFA) software which specifically focuses on sales management and pipeline reporting. This concept that CRM is just for sales is a misconception. Therefore, when evaluating a solution that can help your organization with marketing management and customer service don’t dwell on the sales portion and dismiss the solution.

For pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device manufacturers there are few direct customers and sales force software really isn’t needed. These companies could use the marketing and customer service features of CRM.

Cornerstone Solutions and one of clients were recently featured in a Microsoft CRM case study.  We helped our client take over 250 Microsoft Dynamics CRM users live.  We created over 20 custom objects, but limited custom code.  Sales, Marketing and Service were all utilized to the fullest extent. 

It is great to see our client.... (and us) gain some recognition with Microsoft.

Click here to read the entire case study.

Contract research organizations use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help make decisions on clinical trial feasibility within minutes instead of weeks.

A contract research organization or a CRO is a third party that pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies hire to help them pass the pre-clinical and clinical trial process. During the clinical trial process the CRO needs to hold in-human clinical trial studies.  These studies are managed and reported on by physicians and hospital staff which have to be selected by the CRO.  In order for the CRO to interview the physician their needs to be a large database or way of listing and searching a group of physicians to properly recruit for the clinical trial.

The methodology that CROs are using for this system is to create the account as the pharmaceutical company and the physician as the contact in the system.  When a clinical trial is initiated an opportunity (clinical trial study) is created for the account (pharmaceutical company) and the contact...

Obviously, one of the hottest topics in the Microsoft CRM world today is the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.  Many people might have heard of this project as "Titan" which is the code name Microsoft has given the project internally.  The questions everyone asks is "What is coming in the new release and when is it coming". 

As far as when, the best guess is late 2007 or early 2008.  I have my fingers crossed for late 2007.

Microsoft has kept the "what" pretty quiet, but the two major areas of the release are multi-tenancy and a hosted version.  Multi-tenancy refers to several things including being able to run multiple CRM databases on one CRM server, running Microsoft CRM in multiple languages and having multi-currency capability.

The hosted version of Microsoft CRM is called Microsoft CRM Live.  There is some great information about it here.  The hosted version will be hosted by partners as well as Microsoft.  Of course, on premise is still an option for deployment.  The hosted version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM should make CRM an option for smaller companies and is a direct entry against SalesForce.com. 

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