Hospice CRM that keeps your team with people, not paperwork

How hospice work differs from a clinic

A hospice is different because the admission decision is almost always made by the family, not the patient — and made quickly, at a hard moment. The call often comes from the hospital after a talk with the doctor, in the evening or on a weekend. The family needs to know whether there's a bed, what care includes, which documents to bring and what it costs. If they don't get an answer within an hour, they call the next place.

After admission, what matters most is regular care: repositioning, hygiene, feeding and fluids, blood pressure and temperature checks. A mistake here costs not money but a person's dignity. That's why a palliative care center needs a system where care doesn't depend on one nurse's memory on one shift.

Common challenges palliative teams face:

• inquiries come from families, hospitals, doctors and charities — and get written down in different places;
• there's no shared view of beds: who's being admitted today, who's waiting, where a bed will open up;
• care is recorded on paper, and details get lost at shift handover;
• families pay in different ways — in installments, with several relatives chipping in, with extra services;
• diagnosis and family data sit in shared folders with no access control.

How 95sales CRM supports a palliative team

Family inquiries — nothing lost, no repeated questions

Calls through Binotel or Ringostat (Ukrainian telephony providers; other systems connect through a generic webhook), website forms and ad leads go into the inquiry pipeline, and missed calls show up separately. The first-call intake form helps gather the essentials calmly: age, diagnosis, mobility, swallowing, speech, who makes the decision, who referred them, budget. The coordinator doesn't need to call the family back with follow-up questions.

The default stages are New → Qualification → Consultation → Waiting for a bed → Contract → Admitted → Lost, and you can rename them to match how your team talks. Reasons a family didn't come to you are kept in a list, which helps you see what the center is missing.

Referrers: hospitals and doctors

In palliative care, a large share of patients is referred by oncology departments, primary care doctors and hospitals. In the CRM, each referrer has its own record: how many patients they referred and how much revenue that brought the center. You can see which departments you have working relationships with and where nobody has heard of you.

Beds and admissions

The bed board shows every bed: occupied, waiting for a bed, ready to admit. On admission, the patient gets a site, a bed, a rate and a care level. On discharge, you record the date and reason — transferred to hospital, family's decision, goal achieved, or death. This data matters for honest center statistics and for follow-up with the family.

Care plans and the nurse's phone

Each patient has their own care plan with individual intervals: repositioning, feeding, fluids, linen change, hygiene, blood pressure and temperature. The nurse sees on her phone what's due now and checks it off with one tap; if she didn't get to it in time, she can log it after the fact. Overdue tasks are highlighted, and vitals go straight into the record.

The care log captures observations, incidents and medications. At shift handover, the next nurse sees everything that happened — no verbal recap needed.

Documents and consents

Hospital discharge summary, passport, power of attorney, contract, data processing consent — staff photograph the document with a phone, and the office reviews it and accepts it or asks for a fix. You can see whether a paper original exists and which documents are about to expire. The family doesn't have to bring the same thing twice.

Payments without awkward conversations

Charges are built from the monthly rate, care level and extra services, payments are applied to the patient, and debts are shown by due date. Staff see the exact amount and payment history before talking to the family — no mistakes and no repeat requests. More in payments and debts.

How a CRM supports careful communication with families

Careful communication starts with the family not having to repeat their story to every new staff member. The patient record has a single activity timeline: calls, comments, documents, payments, changes in care. The coordinator, nurse and director all see the same thing, so the family gets consistent answers.

If a patient's condition changes, the head nurse sends an urgent alert to the team — with read receipts, so you can see who got it. Internal chats can be general, per site or direct: work discussions stay in the CRM, not in staff members' personal messengers. Tasks like "call the daughter after the doctor's consultation" go into the planner with a due date and don't get forgotten at shift change.

Checklist: what a palliative care CRM should do

Scenario: an inquiry on a Friday evening

Say a palliative care center has 20 beds, and at 7 p.m. on Friday the son of a patient being discharged from an oncology ward calls.

1. The call comes into the CRM, and the coordinator sees it's a new number. The source is "referral": the family was sent by a doctor from that ward who's already in the referrer list.
2. The coordinator goes through the intake form: the patient is bedridden, has difficulty swallowing, and her son makes the decisions. Everything is saved to the record, with the diagnosis encrypted.
3. There are no free beds, but the board shows one opening on Monday. The record moves to "Waiting for a bed," and the coordinator gets a task to call back on Monday at 10 a.m.
4. On Monday, the son photographs the discharge summary and passport, and the office reviews the documents before arrival.
5. The patient is admitted, and nurses get a care plan with repositioning every 2 hours, checked off from their phones.
6. At month-end, the director sees occupancy, average length of stay, and which referrers trust the center.

Data protection: sensitive information under lock and key

In palliative care, data is especially sensitive: diagnosis, prognosis, family contacts. In 95sales CRM, the patient's diagnosis and relative, the care log and call transcripts are encrypted with AES-256 using a separate key for each customer. Each customer also has its own separate database.

Access is set by roles and permissions enforced on the server: the admissions coordinator sees inquiries, nursing staff see care, and finances are visible only to those who need them. There's 2FA, a session list, auto-lock after 60 minutes, watermarking, copy and print blocking, and every action is recorded in an audit log. More in data security and our guide to protecting medical data.

How a hospice is similar to a care home — and how it differs

A hospice is like a care home in that both have beds, monthly billing and regular care, so the CRM's foundation is the same. The differences are a short and unpredictable length of stay, a bigger role for referrers, and higher demands for sensitivity and data protection. If your center combines both, everything runs in one system with separate sites. For care homes, see CRM for care homes.