Mid America Clinical Laboratories

Like many labs, MACL faced challenges working with static reporting and an industry-agnostic CRM that provided little visibility into key client and patient metrics. Compiling aggregate results for clients was a manual process and could only be provided on an a la carte basis, which led to delayed communication and inefficient use of employees’ time. In order to better compete in the diagnostic lab market and increase their presence across different verticals - including toxicology – MACL evaluated solutions that addressed:

Sales & Pipeline Management: Visibility into rep’s activities, accounts, and opportunities at every stage of the sales cycle to increase revenue and output.

Issue Resolution: Accountability across departments to ensure benchmarks and turnaround times are met for the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

Consistency Reporting: Transparency into patient prescription consistency to identify at-risk patients and solidify the lab as a valuable partner to provider clients.

MACL evaluated several solutions before selecting hc1.com, the only customer relationship management (CRM) solution that is built from the ground up to address the unique needs of healthcare organizations.

“We recognized that having real-time data inputs on service levels, workflow issues, and other factors would allow us to do a better job of exceeding the expectations of our clients, be they hospitals or officebased payments,” said Mark Ballard, MACL’s Chief Information Officer, in a recent interview with The Dark Report.

“We wanted a full-featured CRM that would allow our clinical lab staff to monitor a wide variety of operations inside and outside the lab,” Ballard continued in the interview. “The earlier program was strictly limited to managing sales. It had no ability to collect, store, and report our lab’s clinical patient information.”

Ballard and his team highlight some key differentiators that sets healthcare-specific CRM apart from generic CRMs, including:

• The ability to store historic and live HL7 messages from lab test results and associate current and past message with these messages.
• The access to real-time information used to track workflows and activities across the full spectrum of lab functions.
• The ability to integrate clinical information and to connect that data with the two separate LISs into one single platform.

Management’s decision to activate a healthcare-specific CRM ensured that processes were put in place to help MACL grow and solidify their status as the competitive leader in their market. MACL is now able to optimize various areas across the organization, including:

Sales & Pipeline Management: In order to attract new clients and grow their existing client base, MACL needed a clear, 360-degree view of all sales reps, territories, and lab locations (over 30 in Central Indiana alone) to help move the needle across their sales team. MACL is now able to access a detailed view into the day-to-day efforts of sales reps, as well as a 10,000-foot view of company-wide metrics and pipeline progression.

Issue Resolution: A lack of insight into issue resolution time, resolution codes, and at-risk clients put MACL in the dark when it came to evaluating their position in the marketplace. Now, managers have the information necessary to resolve issues in a timely manner – and prevent future issues from occurring. Up-to-the-moment cases and tasks ensure that all open issues have a plan for resolution and accountable follow up.

Consistency Reporting: In order to grow in the highly competitive and complex toxicology vertical, MACL needed detailed insight into consistent and inconsistent tests, quality metrics, and easy-to-digest reports to increase visibility and transparency with their clients. MACL is now able to take advantage of real-time data in their LIS and provide complete transparency across all drug classes and metabolites, allowing executives to segment results by internal departments, report on consistency and positivity, as well as break down Metabolite levels to help physicians better monitor their treatment plans.

In addition to addressing several key areas of MACL’s business, the healthcare-specific CRM now helps lab staff across the organization improve client retention and grow market share.

“Our sales and field service reps find [hc1] simple to use,” says DeeDee Rivas, MACL Sales Director, in a recent interview with The Dark Report. “Most reps currently use it to manage existing relationships, but we are exploring expanding our use to help generate new business as well.”

Because the platform is HIPAA-compliant and cloud-based, reps can access the details of a specific client practice or account anywhere, ensuring they are not walking blind into a meeting with a client. Instead, they have all relevant information at their fingertips and are ready to discuss solutions. This preparation provides unprecedented value to MACL’s clients and is a huge competitive differentiator for MACL.

In addition, the MACL sales team is able to work closely with ordering physicians to optimize the mix of lab tests they order for patients.

“The Healthcare Relationship Cloud lets sales reps see physician utilization at a glance,” explains Rivas in the interview. “Seeing which tests individual physicians order allows our sales staff to consult with those physicians about their test-ordering patterns and how they might order they most appropriate tests to benefit their patients."