How BlockSurvey Helped Lunder CareForce Scale to 600+ Healthcare Applications Without an Enterprise CRM
Hi, I'm Erin Luers Abbott, Project Manager at Hebrew SeniorLife's Marcus Institute for Aging Research. I lead digital project management and workflow optimization for Lunder CareForce Institute - a new workforce development program training the next generation of certified nurse aides to address the growing caregiver shortage in senior care. My experience with BlockSurvey has been transformative, turning what I thought was a survey tool into a full application management system that powers our entire intake pipeline.
The challenge
We were essentially a startup within a large healthcare organization, and we needed to get an application system live in about a month — one that was FERPA and HIPAA compliant, required minimal IT involvement, and was flexible enough to evolve as we learned. We knew we'd have multiple cohorts running simultaneously and hundreds of applicants to manage, but we didn't yet know exactly what shape that would take. Every enterprise CRM we evaluated was too rigid, too expensive, and too slow to implement for where we were as an organization.
The solution
With BlockSurvey, I stopped thinking about surveys as individual forms and started building a connected workflow - from application intake all the way through screening, enrollment, and onboarding - with the Audience Panel acting as our CRM. Email matching ensured that every resubmission updated a single applicant record rather than creating duplicates, and calculated variables automatically evaluated complex eligibility criteria and mapped the result directly to each record, so my team always knew the next step without opening a single response. I also ran all of our communications - rejection notices, screening invitations, enrollment confirmations - through BlockSurvey's email campaigns, and worked with the BlockSurvey team over six months to shape features like campaign tracking and audience panel deduplication that are now part of the platform.
The results
We now manage over 600 applications across multiple cohorts, all within a system we built and deployed in roughly one month, with zero duplicate applicant records and no external marketing tools required. The automation has dramatically reduced our admin burden - eligibility is scored automatically, campaign delivery is tracked per recipient, and every stage of the workflow updates a single record in real time. BlockSurvey didn't just give us a survey/form tool; it gave us the flexibility to build exactly what we needed and the partnership to keep improving it as we grow.
