A lot of people have been asking what the difference between a Sales CRM and a Clinical CRM is.
First of all, a CRM, a Client Relationship Management system, is a sales and marketing tool that is industry agnostic. It helps you track your marketing, number of leads, and converted clients at your practice or any business. However, in the mental health industry, therapy seekers are so much more than leads and deals.
As practice owners and intake coordinators know well, in mental health care, there is a very nuanced process that has to take place from the time someone inquires all the way to the time someone is at an intake session and matched with a therapist. Even beyond that, there's a lot of client nurture involved. Especially at insurance based practices, revenue is not being tracked in the same way at all as when a salesperson “closes a deal.” This is why a Sales CRM just doesn’t cut it when it comes to handling your intake process.
Practice Axis is a Clinical CRM and one of the distinguishing factors is that every time someone fills out one of our appointment request forms that inquiry is tracked and a history of all that information is coded to a dashboard of reports. This includes reports on the insurance they were using when they inquired, clinical need, etcetera, and a full history of that information is stored in the CRM along with their name and email for sales and marketing reasons.
A second reason is that in a traditional Sales CRM, it's quite difficult to be able to track the same person inquiring for two different intake sessions. For example, if a parent inquires for therapy for their child, but the parent is the one who needs the communication, and perhaps a second parent needs to sign paperwork as well, that's quite difficult to track in a Sales CRM. Now let's say that same parent is also looking for individual therapy and going to a different intake session and a different therapist than her child, of course. So these are some of the examples of the ways that a Clinical CRM needs to be adaptable to the mental health industry.
If you're curious to learn more about the different types of data that a Clinical CRM can yield and all the marketing and sales features that it still maintains from other industries, let's get in touch. We would love to hear what you're tracking at your practice and how you approach streamlining your intake process.