For healthcare orgs, how do you determine who gets entered as a constituent?

Esther Curtis

Hi, 


I'm working for a hospital foundation, trying to build a series of protocols and procedures to both standardize entry and enhance our ability to build accurate lists and queries. I couldn't seem to find any discussion on this particular topic. 


So my question: 


How do other hospital organizations - foundations and such - determine who is entered into Raiser's Edge as a constituent?


Some background on my particular situation is as follows: 


We do receive regular lists of folks who are inpatient at our hospital and may be called as an initial touchpoint. They are not entered into our database automatically, but we do screen them through ResearchPoint. If the patient has had a good experience, we follow up with a letter and some information on how to give. 


At the same time, we may receive names of people who have come to Foundation events, etc., and we'd like to follow up with them at a later point, so those are entered into the Raiser's Edge either through the event module or by hand after the event has occurred (depends on if we are the organizer or not). That's a no-brainer; obviously we want to keep track of those folks. 


My inclination is to enter any patient who has had a good experience and has received a grateful patient letter into the system as a constituent after the letter has been sent. Does anyone have any other suggestions?


Thanks,


Esther

Heather Jacob

Hi Esther,


You may want to consult you compliance department about this. I also work for the foundation of a non-profit healthcare system. Obviously, we make anyone who's given us a gift a constituent. Anyone who's attended an event we make a constituent if they paid for anything or if we've managed to get an address or email address. We figure why go to the trouble of creating a record if they haven't paid for anything and we have no way of contacting them for event follow up or future event communications. If we just have a name, we add them to the event module as a non-constituent so we at least know they were there.


Patients are a different matter entirely, and it could just be that our compliance people are being overly cautious. They tell us there can be nothing in the database that indicates that a person came to be in there because they were a patient. We have a person who makes "rounds" in the hospitals checking in on patients who are already donors or who came back with a high WealthEngine rating. She was tracking her encounters in Raiser's Edge using a "Patient Encounter" action and putting in notes like "Visited Jane today. She was in for a heart cathaterization and is doing well." etc. Now, though all she can say is that she visited or wasn't able to visit and we had to change the name of the action to "Coordinator Encounter".


Someone, many years ago, dumped several thousand patients into RE from recent billing records. I think they did it for a mailing. They got names, adresses, phone numbers, and birthdates. Most of these people have never given us a gift and have a low or non-existant WealthEngine rating. We're still trying to clean up the mess and get them out of there. I run a query each month to get a list of people whose birthdays are coming up in the next month. I make every effort I can to try to make sure that everyone on that list is still alive, so, anyone born before 1935 I search for an obituary or see if I can find a death date for them on ancestry.com. A great many of those people fit into this category, and it creates a lot of work for me. After three years, I finally added their last gift date to my query. If they're 90 years old, have been in our system since 1993, and have never given a gift, odds are pretty good they are not going to start now. I foward the perosn to our prospect researcher/DBA so she can make the final determination of whether they can be deleted or not. An awful lot of cleanup because someone decided it would be great to fill our DONOR database with a whole lot of patients.


I'm sorry for rambling, but I hope this was at least somewhat helpful. I'd love to hear what others have to say.

Maire Moriarty

Hi Esther,


Do you have an end goal for keeping track of these folks? Having them in RE makes it very easy to send a follow-up appeal, for example, but as mentioned by Heather you risk experiencing some significant clutter as a result.


You can also track your response rate to the grateful patient appeal by updating the number solicited on the appeal record, if you aren't already, without having to add the appeal to any constituent records.


What are your thoughts?

Deb Dressely

We do grateful patient mailings to both inpatients and outpatients.  Our mailhouse includes codes on the remit slips to indicate inpatient or outpatient and location of service - we have several hospitals.  We only enter those who make a gift as constituents.  Many have become repeat donors.  We also use Target Analytics patient tags as a way to help identify those most likely to give and to help reduce mailing costs.


Deb