Salesforce launched the Health Cloud service in 2016 with the aim of giving healthcare organizations and clinics like yours a more patient-centric focus, insight, and engagement opportunity.
Today, it helps practitioners improve their EHR by adding apps or patient touchpoints that allow you to engage in new ways on the devices they’re using.
We’ve seen it empower practitioners to deliver more insightful support and provide personalized outreach for the benefit of their practice and their patients.
You might’ve heard about it but aren’t sure if it’s right for you. That’s understandable, especially in a market facing more compliance requirements and oversight. So, here are three questions to ask and answers to check out to see if Health Cloud is a good move for you.
Does It Fit Your Strategy?
You might want to consider the Health Cloud if you’re servicing patients and witnessing their needs evolve. For some providers that means a desire for patients to use mobile and web platforms, while others may see increased data sharing and new payment models or costs.
Salesforce put together this system to give a customer relationship management (CRM) technology platform to help businesses move toward a value-based reimbursement system — whether it is based on your patients’ preferences or your revenue needs.
Does that sound like your strategy and your needs? Are you trying to make patients feel a little more like family and collaborate better with all their care providers? Do you think having better access to them and their information could improve your marketing and service delivery?
Your patients are living in a connected, digital world and this technology is changing many other aspects of their lives. If you’re starting to feel pressure to be more digital or have a more personalized relationship with patients, the Health Cloud might make sense for your growth strategy. If you have ambitions to capture real patient data to integrate into an AI or advanced analytics, there is no better place to gather direct patient interaction data.
Where Does Salesforce Health Cloud Focus?
Salesforce.com’s Health Cloud is designed to create a personalized, collaborative system that looks at each patient individually while also helping you understand trends and information across your practice.
The personalized element for each patient tracks every interaction they have with you. From the initial acquisition through their direct care and the coordination between providers and secondary partners, such as caregivers, to track data and hopefully create a more direct path to better patient outcomes.
The system provides record security model based on strict rules and roles, to your partners and other healthcare professionals so you can keep your patients safe and improve the care they experience. Salesforce.com also provides the Shield Encryption platform that elevates the level of encryption for PHI fields in the system as well as stores field history values for up to 10 years.
In a more advanced deployment, the system is even smart enough to improve the patient’s life continually.
For example, in the Mount Sinai Health System, Health Cloud provided assistance in a variety of ways. This included a module where, if a patient forgets to take medicine, it can reach out to care providers or case managers who can help the patient get back on track or enable them to contact the patient to get the patient to take their medicine and avoid costly hospitalization.
Keeping patients out of the emergency room, and reducing readmission rates, are core components of most new value-based models. Health Cloud makes it easier for you to track these goals, audit results, and improve the likelihood that you’ll be properly compensated.
What’s Next for You and Salesforce?
Staying HIPAA-compliant with leading technologies, data, personalization, and much more is becoming significantly difficult. New platforms, AI, and other touchpoints with patients mean you need to be on your game every second.
Compliance is one of the chief reasons we see Salesforce as a smart partner. Not only is it empowering healthcare providers to interact with patients in new ways, but it keeps data safe and secure as those new features roll out. They’re staying HIPAA-compliant, which means you are too.
By combining clinical and nonclinical data from Salesforce’s CRM tools, it can give you a much more comprehensive view of each patient’s health status and their interactions with you and the broader care setting.
If you’re looking for a way to better understand patients, improve how you can safely manage data, or turn what you’ve got into better service and new customers, we think the Salesforce Health Cloud might be the right platform to grow your operations.
