Hello, everyone, thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar. I have just a few housekeeping notes before we get started today. We are going to be in listen only mode for all the attendees. However, if you have questions during the presentation, you can definitely utilize the Q&A function on the webinar. You can also drop those into the chat. We'll be monitoring both of those in that way. Any questions along the way will be answered. Feel free to interact with each other in the chat as well. Just make sure that when you're doing so you select all panelists and attendees from the drop down above the messages before submitting your chat so everyone can see it. The webinar is being recorded, and we will be sending that recording out to all registrants after the webinar as well. So, without further ado, today's webinar is CRM benefits by department marketing operations and executive team. We're joined today by Ryan Larrell, who is the vice president of RSI. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Ryan to get us started. Perfect. Thank you, Jessica. I appreciate that. First and foremost, I want to thank everyone for joining the webinar today. Most importantly, Jessica and Megan and the AAOE for putting this on and taking the reins on making sure that we have a productive meeting today. This is our first webinar with the AAOE. This was our first year in participating at the AAOE conference. We had a really great meeting and we're excited about future partnerships and relationships within the space. I'll give you a little bit of background about myself as we go ahead and get started and make sure that you all understand who we are and the type of work that we do. Today, as Jessica mentioned, we're going to be going over CRM benefits by department. And what we're going to be focusing on is how we or how a CRM supports the executive team at practices in health care, how it supports operations, as well as how it supports marketing. And those are three very important departments within health care, as everyone knows. And what we find unique about CRM solutions for those department team members is it's really the primary tool built for team members across those departments. In most cases, what we see across health care is you have EMRs that are built for clinicians and clinical care. You have patient engagement solutions built for patients. But there's really been overall a lack of technology built for the executive leadership teams at the practices that are trying to drive growth and trying to ensure the most effective and efficient operational processes are put in place. So that will be our topic today. The learning objectives through the topic are going to be to focus on how a CRM can be beneficial to your practice across those three departments. And we'll want to look at each individual department. So for executive leadership, I'm going to explain to you how when you put together the appropriate CRM strategy, you have an opportunity to gain comprehensive organizational understanding across the practice. We're going to talk about how operations can improve performance through data efficiency, as well as data availability. So those are two very different things for operations. One is making decisions with data that allows you to be efficient with the data that you have. But data availability is very important to operations. And in many cases, we see without the appropriate strategy, that type of data availability becomes challenging. And then we'll talk about marketing and how we can help or a CRM can help enhance decision making and profitability. And most importantly, through this, how we can not only allow marketing to enhance their decision making, but also communicate across departments. That's a very key component of this, making sure that you all walk away with an understanding of how you can put together systems that allow you to cross communicate from a department perspective with data in real time. We'll also touch base on how with the appropriate CRM strategy, you can really enhance your reporting capabilities. We're going to talk a bit about historical and future state of reporting around marketing, spend optimization, contact center performance. I can analyze and improve with the appropriate data around schedule, capacity, ability or availability by appointment type provider or location. We'll talk a bit about analyzing referring provider success as well. A little bit of background about myself and my organization and team. We've been in business for 15 years. We started as actually a call center. And so we were providing marketing support for practices, primarily in the elective health care space. And what we wanted to do is provide very detailed transparency across the lead management process for our practices. So when you think elective, initially our clients were plastic surgeons mostly. And we've over time transitioned our experience in elective health care to clinical health care. And what we've been doing is deploying call center services for those plastic surgeons. We used Salesforce within our call center. We connected to a telephone system called Five9. And it allowed us to understand where calls were coming from and every interaction that took place with the phone calls. As APIs became available, we started to connect to the practice management solutions. And instead of using Salesforce, we started to use our own software that we built to deliver the same customizations and capabilities and patient experience that our clients expected. So since 2003 alone and during 2003, we handled over 600,000 patients through that call center and over 2 billion in patient charges. Now, we don't deploy call centers anymore. We only provide our CRM software. But our CRM software was built by actively managing patient communication. So we're not a company that's just been building a solution based off what we believed our clients needed. We built it based off what we know they need by handling that process. And we integrate across a variety of platforms for clients. So when we talk about integrations, think about our solution like a large marketplace. We connect to all of the practice management systems out there or most of them over 30, NextGen, Athena, Allscripts, ModMed, NextTech, et cetera. We also integrate with phone solutions like RingCentral, Dialpad, 8x8, GoToConnect. We integrate with payments processing. We integrate with patient engagement solutions like forms, SMS messages, reminders, surveys, et cetera. And we consolidate all of that into one place. So that's a little bit of a background about us. While we're new to orthopedics, we've been working in ophthalmology, dermatology, plastic and reconstructive surgery, vein and vascular and podiatry for many years. So for the purpose of today's discussion, I want to outline a little bit of what we've seen in terms of problems for the different departments that we're talking about. And then we'll go through how the appropriate CRM strategy can solve those problems. So for executive leadership team, you all are probably very familiar with these issues. We see a lot of teams spending a lot of time and a lot of money, in many cases much more time than money, on trying to effectively scale practices without transparent data. And what this does is this creates a situation where the executive leadership team is hamstrung by not having the data, which forces them to either make decisions at a very slow pace, or they're making decisions based off assumptions because they can't get the data quickly enough. What causes these problems is typically practices have multiple technologies in place, and those technologies don't communicate with each other. You see that technology start to communicate to each other today, mostly it's patient engagement tools that do reminders or forms or surveys with practice management solutions. But those are the only systems that talk. They're usually left with phones and fax solutions and referring provider methods of getting patients over to the practice, all in disparate systems, which create several platforms that make it difficult to execute strategy. It creates a scenario where marketing investments go untracked and unproved, and it makes it very difficult for the practice to harmonize their data sets to make very quick decisions and appropriate decisions. And so when decisions are made by leadership without the appropriate information, it often causes frustration across the entire business, certainly across departments. For example, you can have decisions made by marketing or for marketing purposes without the input of operations, and that creates problems. You have an efficiency problem, and then that creates scaling issues. And when you don't have access to that information, the business can't grow. Leadership teams are usually spending dollars continually that prove to be ineffective. The operational efficiency stays static or gets worse based off making poor decisions up at a higher level, and then patients have a poor experience, which means they leave the practice. Marketing and operations have different problems than executive leadership teams, where they're typically working in silos. You have marketing that is focused on driving in calls and leads and booked appointments. You have operations that are dealt with the need to manage that, and when those two teams don't communicate effectively or at all, it creates a lot of difficulty. So if marketing, for example, is driving in a lot of phone calls, but we can't see whether or not those calls actually book appointments or what those calls are, it really creates inability to see impact. And you create a scenario where these teams are working off different points of success, meaning marketing might be focused on driving calls, operations focused on managing those calls, but nobody's communicating, and it creates problems. That also makes it so that decisions are made independently by department instead of with each department. Those departments are running with different objectives, and that ultimately creates trouble for the practices to grow. And it results in finger pointing, it results in providers not booked appropriately, and it also results in patients having poor experiences. So when we talk about building the appropriate CRM strategy for practices, you generally want to think of a central entry point of all of the inbound communications for your practices. Today, many practices are attempting to do this, but they've got multiple systems in place. They have one system that helps with scheduling, one system that helps with texting, another system that helps with phone calls, and then another one that helps with referrals and fax solutions. That creates a system where practices are trying to do all of the right things, but by doing and attempting to do all the right thing, they've adopted different programs to do it. And so what we've recognized is practices that streamline all communications into one central repository that then connects with their practice management software, they win. And usually when you adopt this type of strategy, what you recognize is you want a broad set of solutions instead of necessarily the deepest solution. And the reason I say that is, you know, a particular technology that does only one thing usually does that one thing very, very well and often best. But what that does for large practices or executive leadership teams is creates a scenario where in those individual pillars that they have best in class technology, they end up actually losing out because they can't get information from it. Those systems don't talk with other systems and it creates a very bottlenecked approach. So the appropriate and best CRM strategies deployed across practices, whether they're using systems like ours, systems like Salesforce, systems like Go High Level, is they've got everything in one place and they give up some of the depth for a much broader solution that has all of the integrated data in one place. And the integrated data becomes very important for the business management teams today. Again, those are the teams that have often been left in a lurch. We're focused on clinicians first, then patients and business management teams are left to do with what's best for in today's world, the clinicians and the patients versus what's best for them and trickling down. And so you want to have all of that integrated data in one place so that you can actually define the entire patient acquisition process. And so that goes from point of inception of an inquiry to the practice or a referral to the practice all the way through to profitability. When you have that integrated data, a practice can run performance analytics and cross the entire set of data. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. But when you have all of the data in one place, you can start to see with that patient acquisition where there may be bottlenecks. Examples of that might be your marketing may be driving in way more phone calls than you can handle. But marketing continues to market because that's their job. And operations continues to drink from a fire hose. And so if that data isn't congruent and working together, you can't make productive decisions about what to turn off or what to stop for a period of time so that each team can perform at the highest level. And then you want automation around that. CRM deployments have automation throughout the process, and it allows them to communicate to patients at any step in the journey, not just communicate with patients based off data from the practice management system, which is what most technologies do. But also communicate to patients based off what they are doing in terms of communication of funnel, whether they're on your website, whether they've reached out through other practicers or through other referring providers. And you want to automate that communication across your entire business. And this allows you to get into a state of continuous improvement. So when you have everything connected, you've got all of your data and you can make decisions off all of your performance and automation. You can start to continually improve that process. So a few things to discuss here. When you think about how do we get complete data access across that process for executive leadership teams, you should really be thinking about all of the pillars of data you have in the organization. And how do you get it into one place? OK, so, again, many leadership teams that we meet and start conversations with have some data in some spots. They'll have their practice management data, which also has some of their financial data. Maybe not all if they're using an RCM company or they're outsourcing that. And then they've got some data maybe living in their marketing department. They've got phone systems. But these systems become so difficult to access the information and data from that leadership is not making decisions quickly because team members have to take a lot of manual time to get this reporting together. And then somebody else has to take a significant amount of time to blend this data together so that it's usable. And so one of the things that is most important from successful CRM deployments are having complete data access and all of your information in one place. From an operations perspective, you want to think about how you can unify data with communications. So we typically see practices that come to us that have too many practices utilizing too many vendors. And this creates undue work across your teams and the inability to make decisions based on data. So you're all probably familiar with this. Many practices are today. They've got a company that does scheduling, somebody that does reminders and surveys maybe, somebody that's doing forms and patient check-in at the front desk. So you can start to envision all of these different silos of information. And when you think about operations, imagine you're fielding phone calls from patients all day who are talking to you about their relationship with one of these many products you use. You're now putting that operations team in a position where they have no clue what the patient's talking about. They couldn't find it if they wanted to. And if they did find it, it certainly wouldn't be efficient. So you want to unify that data. You want to have a point of call or communication. Your team has access to a single pane of glass, meaning all of the information across the entire organization right at their fingertips. You want to be able to tie these inbound calls and web leads and inbound faxes that they deal with all day to appointments and revenue. So we'll show you a little bit of when we get into the historical appointment data towards future appointment data. I'll show you kind of the difference between what that looks like towards what it could. But tying team member performance actually to phone calls taken to appointments booked allow practices to be as effective with their decision-making. An appointment booked really stops a bit short. You want to look at who's actually showing up. If Ryan's scheduling 50 calls today and Jessica's scheduling 50 calls but Ryan's never show up, then we start to evaluate issues with Ryan. And we can really hone in on who we need to work with. But you can only do that when you're tying data together and looking at team member performance by metrics that drive the business. And you want to marry operations and marketing together. We see too many practices have individuals and teams focused on driving new inbound communications into the practice. And then we have team members that are responsible for handling it, but those two departments never speak. And that's one of the biggest things that you can give to your practices through successful CRM deployment is ensuring that those two departments are making decisions together. For example, a lot of marketing companies think getting calls in on Monday and Tuesday are the best thing for the practice, when in actuality, those are the two busiest days for every practices regardless of marketing. So they're technically the worst days to get those calls to be ringing because your teams usually can't handle the volume they get on Mondays and Tuesdays as is, whereas Thursday and Friday are much later. So being able to communicate departments is very important. In terms of marketing, there's critical data points you can get with successful CRM deployments that give transparent access across the practice. Being able to look at lead volume, but also doing lead scoring by quality. That's a tie in between operations and marketing, understanding whether or not these leads were actually qualified leads, patients with the appropriate ailments or issues that your clinicians can help provide care for, the right insurances from the right areas within your geographic locations. You want to be able to identify speed to communication. So how quickly is our operations team able to get to these leads? Understanding lead and appointment to conversion, meaning who's showing up, and lastly, looking at how quickly can we even get these patients in? So if patients aren't able to get booked quickly enough, they may book appointments, but that can impact adversely your attendance and show rates. So the next thing that I wanted to go through here over the next 10 minutes was showing you some very specific examples of how the appropriate CRM strategy can improve your reporting capabilities. So aside from showing you very simple workflows, that's something that you can certainly reach out to CRM solutions to get some visualizations on, I thought it would be more appropriate to introduce for the first time on our meeting with AAOE, some of the very specific differences between some of the reports that practices are used to without the appropriate CRM deployment, and then what those reports look like after appropriate CRM deployments. So we'll start with marketing spend, we'll move to contact center performance, we'll look at schedule capacity and referring provider metrics for our orthopedic practices and many of our ophthalmic and dermatology practices. These are some of the four drivers that they recognize a need for CRM deployments across the business. The issue with historical marketing data is they're typically looking at arbitrary benchmarks, right? They're looking at clicks and impressions, they look at phone calls, but they have no tie to true conversion. They can't really tell if what they're doing is leading to appointments and revenue. They can't really tell if individual team members are having issues with helping make their campaigns as successful as possible. And there's a very slow feedback loop due to manual processes. So marketing finds out about issues that they're either creating, or issues that are causing ineffective marketing to take place, because they don't find out about it until months or quarters later. This is an example of a traditional agency marketing report. So I'm sure you all are involved and invest in marketing and advertising strategies. You've likely seen these before. You can start to see very simple data, how many people saw my ads? When those people saw those ads, how many people clicked on those ads? And then how many conversions did we have? These are typically the types of reports that marketing is operating off of. So when you look at a report like this, you can see very quickly, one thing I don't worry about is an impact on operations, right? I'm not thinking, well, how many phone calls did this drive into my team? And how busy were they when we drove those phone calls in? And once we drove them in, which team members had the most success with actually handling those calls and converting them to appointments? And if we had those calls handled, how can we compare them to different marketing channels to see if the issues are the team member that might be answering those calls, or to see if it's just the campaign and channel itself? Meaning no matter what we do on that call, we have no ability to convert it because the lead's not of quality. So these are typical agency reporting. The future of performance for marketing is understanding actual attribution by ad campaigns and referral sources. So you see a few groups doing this today. I noticed at the AAOE conference, there was a vendor or two that's really taking the attempt at tracking and analyzing ad campaigns. Of course, without an actual CRM, they're just doing it through some automated tracking. But this is important things that people are starting to bring to healthcare, understanding actual lead count, understanding how many booked appointments occurred, attended appointments, and whether or not we're making money. This gives you the ability to distribute your spend to the highest-performing campaigns. And we talk about high performance. It's not just those arbitrary benchmarks, clicks, and impressions. It's actually driving in people to your team that can actually convert them so that your providers have full schedules and are actually providing the care that your patients need, and then refining those decisions in real time. This is an example of what reporting with an appropriate CRM strategy looks like for your marketing and operations department. Here, you can see actual campaigns run across markets. You can see the traditional data like impressions and clicks. But most importantly, you can see how many calls and leads come in. And of those leads, how many actual appointments are taking place, and how much money are we generating? This gives you the ability to look at cost per lead metrics. So based off the leads we are getting, are we generating enough or are we spending too much on the calls and volumes that we're driving into our practice? And for many practices that are already very busy, what practices don't need is the need to continue to spend money to drive patients in that aren't going to convert based off the channel, the market, or the procedure that's being focused on. And so with the appropriate CRM strategy, you can really connect upstream to systems like Google, to systems like Meta, to your websites to actually ingest all of this data. And then be the middleman that's actually seeing who's handling those calls, managing those calls, and working those patients through to the actual patient and practice management data to understand if it's a financially viable or appropriate campaign to invest in. That ties into the contact center performance. So for anybody that has either a front desk team member or if you have call and contact centers, you want to take that data and drive that information across the voiceover IP and communication tools that are being used. And some historical issues there are most practices have their data in very specific silos. Marketing's doing their thing. Your phone's got their data. Your PM system has their data. So we want to marry that information with a successful CRM deployment so that everybody can make decisions with quick feedback loops. That allows you to understand operations. It allows you to keep schedules full. This is an example of historical data. Some of you may look at things like call wait times and abandoned calls. And while that information's important, it really doesn't matter, right? It's important because you want to make sure that you understand how many calls are being taken. But if you don't understand where we're getting these calls from and who's handling these calls, the amount of time it's taking to handle calls and book appointments that drive up call wait times or cause us to abandon calls, it becomes essentially very useless data because a lot of practices can be very busy and they're abandoning calls. So it comes down to the decisions around that percentage of calls we're missing or the reasons we have long wait times and how do we improve that. So contact center performance of the future ties all of this data together. It gives you the opportunity to look at marketing decisions and understand what's being driven in, what types of appointments are being asked about, which team members are handling those calls or web leads. Is it a particular individual team member problem that creates inefficiencies? Is it day or time of week that creates these efficiencies? And how can we leverage technology to improve that? So when you're leveraging technology through your CRM, you can leverage IVR scripts to do lead routing. And it ultimately gives you the ability to drive in real-time feedback and make performance decisions around training, around coaching, and around all of the things that are interacting with your contact center or your lead management team to help improve their efficiencies. So some of the ways that practices are doing those types of things today is they are using, again, that sort of single pane of glass technology. In most cases today, practices take phone calls. They don't know who it is before they answer the phone. They have to speak with the patient, identify themselves. The patient has to give them a name. They have to spell it. And then they have to go over to their practice management system, let's say Modernizing Medicine, and search for all of the data and look in 10 different spots for the most important data to someone answering a phone call. So with CRM deployments, you can actually pull all of the most appropriate information to the center of the screen. The way that this works with CRM solutions like ours or Salesforce, et cetera, is you can actually use the phone data to automatically search into the practice management system and present to your team member all of the critical data before they even answer the phone. And when you do that, you can actually tie all of the details that they might get questions about, like who they spoke with last, when their next appointment is, how to pay an outstanding balance, in one-click solutions. So it not only lets you know who answered the phone, you can know who that person spoke with when they answered the phone, what type of conversations happened on the phone, and give them the ability to move through that call as efficiently as possible without going into the practice management solution at all. So again, with appropriate CRM deployments, you can tie all of that marketing data into the actual practice management data, which then starts to give you real detail around each team member and their success. So who's handling phone calls that create phone leads, that create web leads or follow-up activities, and that book appointments. And that book appointments is one of the most important details, because now that you can see the appointments booked, you can actually start to track the success rates across those appointments. You can start to see if certain team members are filling same-day slots where other team members never do, and identify if we need to help train those team members in being more efficient with the way that they schedule open availability. Or you can see if certain team members have issues with their patients they schedule never actually showing up. And one of the last pieces I'll touch on here as we come to time is the ability to actually feed into the contact center the appropriate individuals that they should be scheduling with. So we've recognized so many practices that information isn't necessarily available. They aren't being communicated to on a daily or weekly basis which providers have availability and who they should be booking with. So by using schedule availability or utilization reporting and piping that into your call and contact center teams, you can actually start to dictate based off who's calling and what they're trying to book, what insurance plan they have, or what their next availability is across the business where those appointments get scheduled. And that goes into a lot of data points. I do want to be respectful of the time we have. I know we had 30 or so minutes. So we do use future appointment booking, and we also obviously have recognized the referring physician issue across practices. They're getting information from all types of sources, and there's almost no transparency here. So we've recognized with our system, and we've seen across other CRM solutions, you have the ability to centralize all of your referring information so that you can actually look at success rates across referring providers, not just about how many referrals are we getting, but are they actually booking appointments and coming in? And if those referrals aren't actually booking or coming in, it begs the question of do we need to send someone to educate that referring provider or do we just need to tell that referring provider, at this time we're at capacity and we're going to politely decline their referred patients because they're just not right for our practice. So again, I'll leave it with the appropriate CRM solution or the right deployment should really give you a scenario where you have the ability to centralize all of the inbound communications to one platform. You have the ability to tie all of that information to your most relevant and important clinical data, appointments, financials, et cetera. And at the end, spit out reporting in real time, as well as run automation in real time about and across all of that information and data that practices typically don't have access to. So with that, I want to turn it over to a few questions. If you certainly have any questions, you have the ability to go ahead and email me or call me, happy to answer any questions that you all might have. You can see my email information and my phone call information right here on this slide. So I'll go ahead and answer some questions. We do have one here that came through. You know, it was asked when it comes to analyzing or marketing or advertising ROI, what is the best way to integrate the data from ads to the practice? So this is a great question. Any practice spending advertising dollars today, they're usually trying to track. And when you think about advertising dollars, don't just think Google or Meta, right? If you're sending emails out to patients, those are dollars or time. If you're going out to referring physicians and you have a physician liaison, that's both dollars and time. So all of these things should be tracked. The best way to do it is you want to be connected to systems like Google and Meta through their API connectivity. And you want to tie that into what actually occurs for appointments and revenue. You also want to do that across web leads. You want to do that across phone calls. And when those calls come into the business, you tie that data together and you have that integrated to your practice management system. So you can see real time reporting on conversion rates. When it comes to gaining access to this type of information, you really want to have likely a data platform that you can work with, something like a Power BI. You could use Excel today if you had someone who really knew pivot tables, but this kind of data, you really need to be connected to all of your partners. So I think what a lot of practices that are forward thinking today are recognizing is they need the data from all their partners. APIs are available today and that's great, but you're likely using some patient engagement software and those groups don't get asked enough about giving you access to your data. So I would challenge you all to go to your practice, your patient engagement solutions, the digital check-in solutions, the scheduling solutions, the reminder solutions. And if you can't consolidate to one platform and deploy a CRM at this time, you should ask and request, if not demand, access from every data point that they collect. The data is really the currency and efficiency. The data really shows you where you have issues and where you need to provide solutions. So from that perspective, I would say the best way to gain access to it is to begin by asking for it and demanding access to it. You might not know what to do with it yet, but you're going to find out really quickly those groups that can't give it to you or those groups that won't give it to you, I would recommend that those are probably not the right groups for a practice trying to be as effective and as efficient and operate at scale. So those were the two questions that we had. We really, you know, I appreciate everyone's time. I know we're five minutes over. It seems like we've kept everyone that joined during those five minutes of time. So I really appreciate that. You know, we appreciate the opportunity to work with AAOE. Again, if anybody is interested in learning more about what we do or how we might be able to support you or your practice, we're available and, you know, we welcome the opportunity. So with that, I'll turn it over to Jessica and I appreciate everyone's time today. I know everyone's busy and I know your time is valuable. So thank you for that. Thank you so much, Ryan. That was a great presentation. Again, this was recorded and will be shared with all the registrants once the recording is available. So we look forward to seeing everyone next time around and thanks again, appreciate it.

CRM benefits

marketing operations

executive teams

healthcare practices

integrated data

communication

decision-making