Application of Value Chain and CRM to Dental Clinic in Business Areas

Facing a series of decrease on the budget of health insurance and clusters of healthcare facilities, healthcare facilities nowadays take countermeasure to alter their operation. Therefore, managing healthcare facilities by standard procedures, systematically transmitting information of each department, and creating, maintaining, and strengthening staff’s relationships with patients by an innovative management have been a challenge to the survival of healthcare facilities. In addition, today’s medical techniques have become more and more widespread, and this results in different locations of healthcare facilities having different patient types; in this way, the operation of healthcare facilities is affected, and we found the difference of operation of normal healthcare facilities and those in business areas with different patient types is worth discussing. Patients feel nervous about going to the dentist and having the treatment or operation; therefore, to decrease clients’ fear about the treatment and operation and to maintain patient-physician relationships, a complete service procedure and a fine environment are needed. The main purpose of the value chain is to transfer the management of an enterprise from functional one to procedure-one and further to lower the enterprise’s operation costs, improve its operation benefits and economic benefits by the best core professional works, organizational hierarchy, working procedures, information procedures, etc. Customer relationship management is rather applied by an enterprise to fully interact and communicate with its customers, thereby understanding and affecting customer behaviors, attracting new customers, improving customer acquisition rate, customer retention rate, customers’ loyalty, and profit rate. From the above, we found the common point of value chain and customer relationship management lies in enhancing enterprises’ economic benefits. Therefore, under the condition that there are different locations of dental clinics, we may combine the application of value chain and customer relationship management and use them into daily operation of dental clinics in different locations so as to efficiently take advantage of current resources, systematically transmit information among each department, and providing profound medical environment and prominent medical services by a standardized management; in this way, when healthcare facilities are in the operation, they are able to make profits, build up fine patientphysician relationships, and establish the core competitiveness of sustenance of dental clinics by an innovative management. Moreover, we hope the publication of this study, which combines the operation management, experiences of customer relationship management, and standardized procedures of dental clinics in Taiwan, can serve as the reference of the operation management of dental clinics in other countries and spread the concepts of customer-orientation customer relationship management and systematic management.