The application of customer relationship management for digital health systems with the management of outpatients as a use case

Abstract

Outpatient services are growing in demand: several issues arise when trying to accommodate so many patients, leading inevitably to inefficiencies in various departments. During the previous years, healthcare services have undergone major changes at an increasing rate. The rate of change in healthcare systems will keep on accelerating as both patients and professionals incorporate technology into their procedures. This project attempts to address the patient readmission problem. To investigate patient readmission, clinical processes were examined to design a prototype Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Furthermore, since patient readmission is not currently taken into consideration within the Oncology clinic, prediction algorithms to calculate the likelihood of patient readmission will be implemented on an external dataset to increase clinic efficiency. Meetings with domain experts within the Survivorship team at the Oncology clinic were held to go over clinical practices, current challenges, and data aspects that would be best visualised in the CRM system. A System Usability Study (SUS) with 5 respondents was carried out to have feedback on the CRM, on its functionality and design. The participants chosen were all staff within the Oncology department who were very exposed to healthcare technologies. According to the findings of this study, participants in various roles chose to adopt the CRM system since they considered it to be quite useful to clinicians. The usability score achieved was 95.5, indicating that the CRM and dashboards were well-designed for this scenario. The Friedman test was also used to ensure that the mean participant result was similar, meaning that all participants gave positive feedback regarding the CRM. Moreover, the performance of the prediction models was quite high. The Random Forest model had the best performance with an accuracy of 96.6%, and it can therefore be considered as a solution to patient readmission in the outpatient setting.