I am going to go over approximately 5 technologies that can be used by as IT in healthcare. The very first one that we are going to look at is CRM. What is CRM? CRM is customer relation management. For an industry like healthcare, where so much relies on the physician-client relationship, it is vital for those in the healthcare industry to know their clients if they want to provide high quality and service. This may include things like appointment reminders being sent out, or birthday cards being sent. It could also involve knowing how often a client visits the hospital, or generally collecting patient information to be used by management to provide direction. While the term CRM can, and has traditionally been done without technology, technology allows for the automation of many tasks which were time consuming in the past. In BC, healthcare is mostly focused on providing good care and not necessarily good service. Doctors are paid on a fee schedule meaning that everything that they get paid for is based on how much work they do. Therefore, there is little to no incentive in the public system in Canada for physicians to really get to know their customers well. Healthcare CRM is much more useful in the USA because doctors and clinics there really need to get to know their clients because of the fierce competition. Here, CRM provides an opportunity to get to know each individual clients needs, and how to market to them very effectively. The CRM software collects as much data as they can about a patient in order to personalize services. There are a few CRM providers in healthcare such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and CPM Healthgrades to name a few. CPM Healthgrades, being specifically designed for the health industry has many features like health risk assessments, online educational information, as well as some BI features that look at marketing and BI. Salesforce and Dynamics are more generalized solutions that offer simple but general solutions. However, they are not nearly as specialized towards the healthcare field and would probably require large amounts of money to customize them to the individual needs of a clinic.