How ascend’s CRM supports Grateful Patient Programs

The majority of hospitals in the United States are nonprofit organizations that rely heavily on philanthropy to fund their missions of providing patient care, community-based healthcare programs, and funding research to discover how to prevent, treat, and cure diseases.

It’s well known that university development offices track alumni in their fundraising system as the key constituency to reach out to for philanthropic support of the university’s programs. In that same manner, patients are the key constituency of hospitals and academic medical centers to reach out to for philanthropic support.  

Security and privacy considerations for building a healthcare fundraising program.

Given the sensitive and private nature of patient health care, hospital grateful patient fundraising programs have more complexity and require additional considerations. Federal, state, and local laws regarding patient privacy must be considered, and safeguards must be put in place to protect private health information.  

The most well-known is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) also restricts what patient information can be shared with a health care development office.  

Given the need to track patients as potential fundraising prospects and the strict security requirements around patient information – the selection and implementation of a fundraising system becomes more complex. 

Medical Development offices, when looking to upgrade their fundraising system with newer technology and functionality, put the ability to configure system security at multiple levels at the top of their system requirements.  

For a deep dive into grateful patient programs, watch our webinar, Building and Enhancing Grateful Patient Programs.

Kindsight’s ascend CRM

There are many CRM systems available to choose from when implementing a healthcare fundraising program. However, given the need to securely track patients as potential fundraising prospects while adhering to strict privacy requirements surrounding patient information, Kindsight’s ascend CRM is the strongest option available for this purpose.

Kindsight’s ascend CRM system is built directly on Salesforce’s CRM platform and has the ability to leverage Salesforce’s compliance categorization model to flag fields that have special privacy requirements and require additional security controls in concert with Salesforce’s security model which uses object-level, field-level, and record-level security to secure access to object, field, and individual records. ascend is a 100% Salesforce native application, and the Grateful Patient module inherits Salesforce’s HIPAA compliance standards.

Our ascend CRM includes a Grateful Patient module that is tightly integrated with the Biographic, Gift Processing, and Prospect Management modules. The Grateful Patient module provides the ability to track medical encounters, service lines, and patient referrals in ascend while also being able to seamlessly leverage the functionality in the other modules.   

For example, clients have created Patient Only Contact Reports that are separate from Contact Reports for major gift prospects using the security features to restrict viewing of the Contact Reports to the designated business users.   

Managing patient privacy by user role

Kindsight’s ascend Clients have leveraged Salesforce’s security model to restrict the patient-specific information to be viewed only by users within specific medical fundraising roles when implementing the ability to track medical encounters, service lines, and patient referrals in ascend.

Automated contact information

They have applied automations to share a patient’s name and contact information conditionally once the patient has donated a gift to the Academic Medical Center to other gift officers. This limited donor information is shared while the medical encounters, patient referrals and service lines continue to be hidden security from view.    

Flexible data security

Salesforce provides a comprehensive and flexible data security model that clients have leveraged in implementing ascend’s Grateful Patient module to enforce their policies and procedure around sharing patient information.  

Clients have designed their organization’s security model and automations to support the ability to have a single constituent record in ascend, streamlining data entry and optimizing operation processes. This results in being able to apply conditional business rules to share information outside of protected health information when appropriate to collaborate on a prospect fundraising strategy for a patient who indicated a desire to make a gift.  

Given the flexibility of the ascend system and Salesforce’s security model, clients are able to design and implement their data security controls and automations to align with their organization’s policies and business processes. 

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Ultimately, the success of a Grateful Patient program hinges on effectively navigating the intricate balance between fundraising goals and patient privacy. ascend CRM stands out as a powerful solution by offering robust features specifically designed to meet these unique challenges. Built on the secure foundation of Salesforce, ascend provides multi-layered security controls and automations that empower healthcare organizations to tailor data access and sharing protocols in alignment with their specific policies and procedures.

This ability to manage patient information securely and transparently enables hospitals and medical centers to cultivate relationships with grateful patients, transforming their generosity into vital resources that support research, enhance patient care, and expand community-based healthcare programs. Choosing Kindsight’s ascend means choosing a platform that not only facilitates fundraising success but also prioritizes the privacy and trust that are paramount in the healthcare landscape.

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Nancy Benavente

Nancy is a Senior Project Manager at Kindsight with over 30 years of operations experience in higher education, medical centers, and nonprofits. She is an expert in improving business processes, implementing new fundraising systems, and building fundraising capacity.