Do Hospitals and Health Systems Put Too Much Trust in Their CRM Data?

// By Jim Samuel //

Healthcare organizations use customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to manage patient information, appointments, and communications. Are they putting too much trust in the accuracy of the data in their systems? One study of CRM data quality says the answer may be yes.

If your health system uses a customer relationship management (CRM) system to engage patients, you may think the data in your system is clean, accurate, and reliable. If that describes you, you may be wrong.

Validity recently surveyed more than 1,200 CRM users from more than 600 organizations across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The results weren’t good, revealing that users have unfounded confidence in the quality of their data. While the survey was of CRM users from all types of organizations, the lessons are likely to apply to healthcare.

According to Validity, there are wide-ranging interpretations of the term “high-quality data,” but it generally requires accurate, complete, reliable, relevant, timely, and valid data.

When asked about specific data quality issues that can seriously affect their ability to use their CRM systems successfully, respondents gave the following answers:

• Missing or incomplete data — 56 percent
• Incorrect data — 46 percent
• Duplicate data — 44 percent
• Expired data — 35 percent

Here we’ll share highlights from the report, “The State of CRM Data Management 2022,” including reasons these problems exist, and steps you can take to fix them.

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