CRM for Care Coordination
Care coordination is the work that happens between appointments. It involves managing transitions between providers, tracking follow-up actions from visits, coordinating with specialists, ensuring medication adherence, monitoring chronic conditions, and keeping patients on their care plans. Most CRMs track customer interactions as a timeline of calls and emails. Care coordination requires tracking clinical tasks, provider-to-provider communication, and patient outcomes across multiple touchpoints and care settings. When your practice manages 500 patients with chronic conditions, each with a care plan involving medications, specialist visits, lab work, and lifestyle modifications, a contact timeline does not give your care team the visibility they need.
What to look for in a CRM for care coordination
Care plan tracking per patient
Each patient with a chronic condition or complex care needs should have a care plan that tracks goals, interventions, responsible providers, and progress. The system must support structured care plans, not just notes.
Task assignment across care team
Care coordination involves multiple people: primary care provider, specialists, care managers, social workers. The system must assign and track tasks per team member with visibility across the full care team.
Transition of care management
When a patient moves between settings (hospital to home, primary care to specialist, inpatient to outpatient), the system must track the transition, ensure handoff documentation is complete, and trigger follow-up tasks.
Patient communication and outreach
Medication reminders, appointment follow-ups, lab result notifications, and wellness check-ins should be automated based on the care plan. The system should reach patients through their preferred channel without manual outreach from staff.
Outcome tracking and reporting
Care coordination is measured by outcomes: hospital readmission rates, medication adherence, care plan completion, and patient satisfaction. The system must track these metrics per patient and in aggregate for the practice.
Multi-provider visibility
When a patient sees three providers, each provider needs to see the full care coordination picture. The system must provide shared visibility across all providers involved in a patient’s care without requiring each provider to use the same EHR.
How the tools compare
| Tool | Price | How it handles care coordination | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Health Cloud | $350/user/month | Care plan templates, task assignment, patient timeline, and care team collaboration. Purpose-built care coordination features within the Health Cloud module. | Enterprise pricing makes it inaccessible for most independent practices. Configuration requires specialised Salesforce health IT consultants. The care coordination module is powerful but expensive to implement and maintain. |
| HubSpot CRM | Free to $75/user/month | Contact timeline, task management, email sequences, and workflow automation for follow-ups. | No concept of care plans, clinical tasks, transitions of care, or outcome tracking. The timeline shows marketing and sales touchpoints, not clinical coordination activity. Not designed for this use case. |
| Zoho for Healthcare | $50/user/month | Custom modules can be built for care plans. Task assignment and workflow automation available. Zoho Projects can handle multi-person task tracking. | No native care coordination structure. Building care plans, transition tracking, outcome monitoring, and multi-provider visibility requires building a custom application within the Zoho ecosystem. |
Care coordination is a clinical workflow that sits between CRM and EHR. Salesforce Health Cloud is the only CRM-adjacent platform that handles it natively, but at enterprise pricing. EHR platforms handle parts of it (care gaps, follow-ups) but within their own ecosystem, making cross-provider coordination difficult. General CRMs have no care coordination capability. Most practices coordinate care through phone calls, faxes, and shared spreadsheets, which is exactly how patients fall through the cracks.
What about population health and care management platforms?
| Tool | Price | How it handles care coordination | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|---|
| Athenahealth | $140/provider/month | Care coordination features within the EHR including care gaps identification, patient outreach, and transitions of care documentation. | Care coordination is embedded within the EHR workflow. Practices that need care coordination as a standalone function or need to coordinate across multiple EHR systems find Athenahealth’s coordination limited to its own ecosystem. |
| Nextech | $35/user/month | Specialty-focused EHR with basic patient communication and follow-up features. | Built for specialty practices (dermatology, ophthalmology), not for care coordination across multiple providers or complex chronic disease management. |
What Edgevance builds for care coordination
Edgevance builds CRM platforms where care coordination is a structured workflow connected to the patient record. Each patient has a care plan with goals, interventions, responsible providers, and measurable progress. Tasks are assigned across the care team with visibility for everyone involved.
Transitions of care trigger automated workflows: follow-up scheduling, medication reconciliation tasks, handoff documentation checks, and patient outreach. When a patient is discharged from hospital, the system ensures the primary care follow-up happens within the required timeframe.
Outcome tracking shows the practice which care coordination activities produce results. Readmission rates, care plan adherence, and patient engagement metrics are tracked per patient and in aggregate. Your care team makes decisions based on data, not intuition.
Frequently asked questions
Care coordination focuses on managing a patient’s care across multiple providers and settings to ensure continuity and prevent gaps. Case management typically focuses on complex individual patients who need intensive support navigating the healthcare system. Both require tracking tasks, providers, and outcomes, but case management involves deeper social determinants assessment and resource navigation. A CRM that handles care coordination can often support case management with additional workflow configuration.
Many practices try. The problems are immediate: spreadsheets have no automated reminders, no task assignment with accountability, no patient communication capability, no real-time visibility for the care team, and no outcome tracking. When a care manager is coordinating 80 patients with chronic conditions, a spreadsheet becomes a liability within weeks. The first missed follow-up that results in a readmission costs more than a proper system.
Value-based care models (ACOs, bundled payments, chronic care management billing codes) directly reimburse for care coordination activities. CMS chronic care management codes (99490, 99491) require documented time spent on care coordination. A system that tracks coordination activities with timestamps and documentation supports billing for these codes. Practices without structured tracking leave reimbursement on the table.
Your patients.
Your care team.
Edgevance builds CRM platforms that coordinate care across providers, track outcomes, and keep patients on their care plans.
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