By Allison McCarthy, MBA
Establishing a physician relations tracking system is much more than selecting the right product. In fact, that’s actually a small part of the effort. Those who have successfully selected and implemented systems took an inside-out versus outside-in approach. They created the right work team and detailed the processes to be tracked so that system selection became obvious.
Part one of a two-part series, this article outlines the key elements of a successful physician relations tracking system implementation. The first step is to identify the key stakeholders and defined roles/responsibilities in the effort – which includes their participation in software selection. The rest of the implementation process follows, including customization, installation and training.
Change is hard – and implementing a physician relations tracking system changes things: information sharing, performance assessment and integrating qualitative findings with quantitative results. The outcome is worth the hard work of implementing the right system. But in the end, it’s only successful if it’s fully integrated into the representative’s work habits, retains credible details about the physician customer and produces meaningful reports for leadership. That’s why stakeholder participation and buy-in is so vital.
The key players to be involved include:
Project Team – including representatives from each user group, IT, physician data owners and key report recipients. Users that are often considered are:
- Acute care physician relations reps
- Long term care reps
- Ancillary service reps
- Physician recruiters
- Payer relations
- Employer sales
- Marketing
- Call center/web management
- Medical staff office/credentialing
The project team is responsible for defining the tracking system’s scope, outlining current processes and any changes needed, defining and managing the implementation plan, data validation, system customization and installation.
Project Manager – the diversity of the team and its significant work responsibilities necessitates that a leader manage the effort. Since the bulk of the decision-making is related to physician information capture and reporting, a “Super User” is often assigned the role. Sometimes matching the “Super User” with an IT leader makes an even stronger leadership force. That co-leadership team brings together the understanding of relational databases, tracking requirements and organizational utilization of the information.
Executive Sponsorship – a significant challenge in implementing these systems is adequate organizational commitment to see it through. Niche systems such as these often compete for attention with other more significant IT platform needs (clinical, scheduling, financial, etc…). A senior leader must be positioned as the “champion”. This is typically the person who most desires the physician market intelligence to be extracted from the system. But they also need to be able to influence the breadth of stakeholders involved including IT, decision support/finance/planning, credentialing and physician relations. Their role is to stay informed, clear roadblocks and prioritize resources.
Consultant – for those who are new to the physician relations world, an outside resource can be helpful to: • guide project leaders through key decisions, • define the work processes captured in the system, • outline ongoing data integrity requirements, and • design initial custom reports. This resource should have expertise in physician relations and solid experience helping other programs through similar efforts.
Vendor – once the system is selected, the vendor also becomes an integral part of the project team. So it’s important in the vendor selection process to assess both system fit and the compatibility of the individuals working together through development. In recent years, several CRM system vendors have completed physician relations specific projects – so that selecting someone with little to no experience should no longer be necessary.
In the end, physician relations tracking is not about technology; it’s about the users and processes to be tracked and managed in the system. As a result, selecting the right players to lead the effort is critical to development success.
Read Part two of this article, focused on “best practice” implementation now: CLICK HERE.