As the healthcare industry advances in complexity, design, and management, pharmaceutical and life science companies must adopt automated systems to streamline daily operations. 

For sales forecasting, automating tasks, expense reporting, marketing campaigns, and customer service, technologies like customer relationship management (CRM) help to keep track of how companies engage their customers. 

These systems are also central to nurturing ongoing contracts with healthcare professionals, sales reps, and other stakeholders. 

When a medical or life science organization has healthy working pharmaceutical CRM software, it ensures proper patient or customer monitoring, promotes business relationships, and ultimately helps to generate more revenue.

We’ve explored in great depth how pharmaceutical CRM software can help in the adoption of personalized medicine for better patient care. Here’s how it works.

Table of Contents

• Understanding personalized medicine
• The role of pharma CRM in personalized medicine
• Data collection and analysis with pharma CRM software: Platforce
• Ethical considerations related to data privacy and security in the pharmaceutical industry
• Treatment adherence and monitoring using pharmaceutical CRM software
• Overcoming challenges with customer relationship management in healthcare
• Final thoughts

Understanding Personalized Medicine

Drug design and development used to be a one-size-fits-all model. However, with the discovery of how the presence or absence of certain genes affects drug metabolism, efforts have been made to factor in genetic markers during drug production and dispensing of medications. 

Personalized medicine is a modern practice involving genetic considerations while making therapy decisions for patients.

Personalized medicine does not mean the drug is developed for a single person. Rather, it means drug development and drug use design for specific genetic populations. This means that the treatment option is based on factors like sex, race, gene factors, and dosage regimen.

For example, a patient who’s a poor metabolizer has little or no CYP2D6 gene function, while an ultrafast metabolizer will metabolize drugs extensively and quickly. 

Knowing if a patient is a poor or ultrafast metabolizer will assist the physician in determining the right dose to prescribe and avoid side effects associated with metabolic problems. Personalized medicine is the future of precise prescription and optimal patient care.

The Role of Pharma CRM in Personalized Medicine

Pharmaceutical CRM software allows medical representatives to manage current customers and improve their marketing strategies. This is critical to boosting sales reps’ performance in the pharma industry.

Pharma CRM also provides an avenue for doctors and other healthcare providers to record multiple data about a patient such as their demographic, medical history, genetic information, insurance payers, and drug use history. Using CRM software serves multiple roles in personalized medicine delivery. These roles include:

Pharma CRM: Accurate Data Collection and Analysis

When a hospital, pharmacy, or healthcare facility installs CRM software, it can easily record, monitor, and improve patient or customer interactions. Analyzing the data is useful to gain insights about the patient’s health performance over time, their habits, and other useful patterns.

The organization can interpret the insights to understand the state of their patients and develop personalized strategies for each patient’s therapy.

Pharma CRM: Enhanced Communication

Pharma CRM software provides multiple communication channels like email, SMS, phone calls, and other media for enhanced patient or customer interactions. Having a CRM solution that allows the medical or sales team to capture leads, monitor patients, and maintain constant communication is critical to the success of any healthcare organization. 

For example, a customized pharmaceutical CRM system can help pharmacists send reminders for patients to take their pills at the right time. This will assist the pharmacist in providing optimal pharmaceutical care for better health outcomes.

Another instance where having an efficient CRM system is important is in the prevention of missed appointments. The technical support team can program the CRM software to set up automatic reminders for patients’ future appointments. 

Pharma CRM: Gathering Patient Feedback

As the world evolves, technology offers new and improved ways to deliver swift, efficient, and convenient services. Healthcare providers can bank on a solid CRM solution to get valuable feedback from their patients. 

The feedback can help healthcare professionals (HCPs) understand how effective their patients’ therapy is and how it can be improved. They can easily get information about any adverse drug effects and possible gene-medication concerns.

Data Collection and Analysis with Pharma CRM Software: Platforce

Healthcare customer relationship management software collects different patient data types. The data is then used to create an extensive profile for each patient. Some of the data usually collected for managing patient-provider relationships effectively include:

1. Demographics: Personal information like the patient’s age, sex, address, contact, and insurance details.
2. Health history: This covers the patient’s past medical diagnoses, treatments, medications, and surgeries.
3. Lifestyle behaviors: This includes habits and behaviors such as exercise, substance use, and dieting patterns.
4. Appointment history: Records of previous appointments, reasons for visits, and outcomes.
5. Communication history: Phone conversations, emails, and text communications between the patient and the healthcare institution.
6. Billing and payment information: Financial information concerning the patient’s insurance status and payment records.

CRM software enables healthcare providers to nurture leads by providing personalized follow-ups based on the patient’s needs and preferences. This is possible with the use of data analytics CRM tools to collect and analyze data like demographics, health conditions, or treatment history.

Personalized communication also aids in the development of trust and rapport, resulting in improved patient-provider interactions.

Ethical Considerations Related to Data Privacy and Security in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Pharma businesses and other healthcare-providing ventures use CRM software to collect, store, and analyze customer data, such as contact information, medical history, credit card information, feedback, therapy patterns, and behavior. 

While this data can help pharmaceutical businesses improve their patient care delivery and get more deals through sales campaigns, it also poses a data security threat to patients. Patients want assurance that their data is safe from data breaches, and theft. 

Here are some tips to secure data privacy when using pharmaceutical CRM software:

1. Choose a CRM platform with a transparent privacy policy, good regulatory compliance, and efficient data management systems. 
2. Train your sales teams or support staff on how to ensure data privacy with CRM software. 
3. Use strong passwords and authentication tools to protect your CRM software and prevent unauthorized access,
4. Encrypt and backup the data on the CRM software to prevent data loss or corruption.
5. Keep your CRM software up-to-date to strengthen its functionality and prevent incompatibility issues. 

Patient Engagement and Communication

Whether you run a local pharmacy or you have a private clinical practice, using a CRM system will help to facilitate better patient engagement and communication. Before digital CRM systems became popular, doctors and HCPs interacted with patients in person. Follow-ups were not easy as it was up to the patient to follow their treatment instructions. 

However, with the advent of CRM solutions, HCPs can automate messages to each patient to remind them about tests, follow-up consultations, and medication use.

This helps patients manage their health better and build a good rapport with healthcare providers. Such a relationship motivates more individuals to seek out physicians who can answer questions and help them live healthier lives.

Treatment Adherence and Monitoring Using Pharmaceutical CRM Software

Regardless of how meticulous a doctor designs a patient’s treatment, it can only be effective if the patient adheres to the therapy. Patients can succumb to non-adherence due to the medications’ side effects, the inconvenience of returning to the hospital, a hectic lifestyle, or frequent work travel.

An effective CRM system gives a 360-degree perspective on how several factors like behavioral patterns, demographics, and lifestyle choices contribute to treatment adherence.

For example, analyzing a patient’s lifestyle and behavior can help predict when a patient is likely to skip dosages. It can also be used to identify those with the propensity to abandon therapy. 

Here are three approaches HCPs can use to improve patient adherence: 

1. Create an extensive overview of the patient using pertinent data. 
2. Design models to identify key contributors to non-adherence. 
3. Use predictive analytics to forecast future trends in adherence behavior. 

HCPs can use pharma CRM software built with patient hubs to reach patients directly with strategic interventions that could improve adherence. Using such real-time monitoring solutions can improve awareness of potential treatment concerns which helps in treatment modification for better health outcomes.

Overcoming Challenges with Customer Relationship Management in Healthcare

Healthcare providers use CRM systems to implement personalized therapy for patients. However, using a CRM platform is not without its challenges. Here are five common challenges HCPs face when using CRMs and how to resolve them: 

1. Security concerns

Pharmaceutical companies must follow a security-first model when dealing with customer data. To ensure that the pharma CRM is free of any cybersecurity threats, employing experts to routinely inspect the software is essential.

Healthcare firms should train their staff on basic to advanced data management rules to prevent data breaches. When a company establishes proper security practices, customers can be assured of their data safety and this in turn helps the company’s reputation.

2. Complex integrations

Expert CRM software providers allow healthcare companies to integrate any feature needed. This is particularly important when integrations with external apps become key features that are necessary for effective patient relationship management.

3. Data migration technicalities

Migrating data from one product to another can be tasking. And without the right experts on board can result in data loss. CRM providers like Platforce make data migration easier by providing customized tools to ease the transition.

4. Low User Adoption

Installing CRM software is the first step towards improved patient care in a healthcare organization. The next step is adoption, where the employees use the software in actual practice.

Some employees may refuse to make maximum use of the CRM software due to a perceived lack of value, or insufficient training. As a result, data is inadequate or erroneous, making it difficult to derive valuable insights, resulting in ineffective decision-making.

Companies should invest in training programs to onboard their staff to the technical know-how of CRM systems.

5. Regulatory Compliance

Businesses in the healthcare sector must implement all the regulatory requirements for data privacy. These include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), a federal law that was created to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.

Pharma and life sciences companies must collaborate with legal and compliance teams to strike a balance between leveraging customer data for effective CRM strategies and ensuring data privacy and protection.

Final Thoughts

Modern healthcare focuses on how precisely doctors can deliver treatment for optimized individual patient care. For example; Personalized medicine is one of the recent advancements in healthcare that provides healthcare services according to the need and health requirements of the patient.

For healthcare professionals, customer relationship management software can help in monitoring drug use, adherence, side effects, and receiving feedback from patients. Pharma CRMs also helps analyze data to promote better healthcare delivery to patients.

To insure the safety and security of these patients’ data, It’s advisable to choose reliable and regulated Pharma CRM like Platforce that complies with regulatory frameworks, supports integrations with external apps, and provides a comprehensive suite of tools to facilitate relationships with customers.

See for yourself!