Here is a great link to a webcast hosted by Microsoft.  It basically is all about how the health plan industry needs to increase their customer service operations to better suite their customers or their customers will look for other health plan managers.

Click here view the webcast.

In discussing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions with many marketing professionals I tend to think that marketing is the most overlooked component of the software.  Not only is the software component overlooked but the idea of marketing seems to not be foremost in the minds of a lot of “Marketing” professionals.  Many individuals whom I speak to say “we don’t market our product, it sells itself” or “we really don’t have a strong marketing department”.

Here are the 6 steps to developing a Marketing Strategy:

1. Market
2. Read More »
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There has been a fair amount of talk in the market of late about Microsoft’s new hosted version of CRM called Microsoft CRM Live. 

salesforce.com has decided to play dirty by publishing factual but incomplete information about Microsoft’s CRM R&D budgets.  They state that Microsoft’s total R&D budget for Xbox is greater than that of CRM.  And their findings are true.  What they forgot to state in the numbers is the total market share of each respective product and salesforce.com’s own R&D budget.

The video game console business is a $30 billion dollar a year business.  CRM market in 2006 was $12.6 Billion, of which approximately 37% will be from licenses.  So the entire CRM software market will split about 4.5B in revenue.  30 billion is a much bigger market than 4.6 billion.  It makes sense to spend more money on a larger market than a smaller one.

What does salesforce.com spend on their R&D?  saleforce.com spent about 9.8 million in 2005, 7.0 million in 2004 and 4.6 million in 2003 (&l ... Read More »

Sometimes when executives hear CRM they only think about managing sales.  In fact, CRM is about managing all interactions with the customer.  If you customer happens to be a patient as well then instead of calling it a CRM you can turn it into a PRM or a patient relationship management solution.

Here are a few benefits to adopting a PRM:

Help prevent additional illness. With a 360-degree view of the patient, physicians can more easily identify relationships between current symptoms and future health concerns.

Improve the quality and consistency of care. Automated processes can be created to ensure critical safety procedures are followed, and that the organization is in compliance with privacy and other regulatory policies.

Speed routine processes, such as admissions, referrals and discharges. By analyzing the performan ... Read More »

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.