HealthSouth Begins to Reap the Productivity Benefits of Bringing 1,000 Marketing Reps Onto Mobile CRM

The health care industry has been notoriously slow compared with other industries in adopting digital technology to improve marketing effectiveness.

But HealthSouth, the nation's largest provider of inpatient rehabilitative healthcare services, has committed itself to a technology strategy covering its marketing activities intended to defy that notion.  Over the last year, it has  implemented a mobile version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for 1,000 of its rehabilitation liaisons in the field--essentially its sales force-- in one of the largest such implementations anywhere. The liaisons use and update CRM on their Blackberry devices using MobileAccess from TenDigits.  Sales management and hospital operations users access CRM using PCs.  Extensive sales reporting has been developed using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and the reports are distributed via SharePoint.

"Full implementation was completed earlier this year," says Kelli Briggs, a HealthSouth senior business analyst. "It is a robust application and we can see that we are being more productive each day, versus before, when all the forms were being filled out by hand and over the phone."."

She adds, "The reduction in cycle time of the sales process is ensuring that potential patients and referral sources have knowledge of and access to HealthSouth's excellence in clinical outcomes."

The transition to automating its marketing activities has required a major shift at HealthSouth. While the company has long been a leader in applying the latest technology to its rehabilitative services, its marketing activities were another matter, says Rusty Yeager, deputy CIO.

"Our  liaisons--the people who stay in touch with doctors and healthcare professionals in hospitals to assess potential patients for HealthSouth hospitals--are constantly on the road," says Yeager.  "Until last year, they relied heavily on well-established conventional tools like telephones and paper-and-pencil to keep tabs of opportunities. ...