Salesforce Health Cloud is a specialized patient and provider platform for health industry organizations to automate their practices and provide more personalized care. Utilizing the security of cloud technology (alongside mobile and social capabilities), Health Cloud aims tolower costs and increase productivity, providing a 360 view of patients and their needs.
Since its release in 2016, Salesforce Health Cloud has come a long way, taking in the considerations of a very sensitive and versatile health industry. And now, Customer 360 for Health – Salesforce’s latest AI-powered healthcare solution – is one more step in the right direction towards more empathetic care, patient trust, and team collaboration.
What is Salesforce Health Cloud?
In its essence, Salesforce Health Cloud connects the relevant teams so that a patient receives the right care, no matter whose hands their care is in. Plus, patients don’t need to worry about their data as Salesforce’s multi-layered security approach ensures that their information is only passed to the healthcare professionals that need it.
With Health Cloud, care teams have easy access to clinical and non-clinical patient and member data including current health conditions and medications, appointment history, communication preferences, and data from the EHR and other systems.Salesforce
Health Cloud is one of the Salesforce Industry Clouds: a solution tailored to meet the unique needs of specific industries. It combines the best of Salesforce’s CRM capabilities with advanced features tailored for healthcare providers, payers, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. The goal of Health Cloud is to deliver personalized, connected care across the entire healthcare ecosystem, from patient engagement to care coordination and beyond.
Why Use Salesforce Health Cloud?
Any organization in the healthcare industry can benefit from Salesforce Health Cloud, including:
- Healthcare providers (e.g. hospitals, clinics, and ambulatory care centers)
- Payers (e.g. insurance companies and government healthcare agencies)
- Medical device manufacturers
- Pharmaceutical companies
- Clinical research organizations
In the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, organizations face numerous challenges such as managing complex patient data, coordinating care across teams, and delivering personalized patient experiences. Salesforce Health Cloud addresses these challenges head-on by providing a 360-degree view of the patient, streamlining workflows, and offering robust analytics and reporting tools. By utilizing Health Cloud, healthcare providers can improve patient satisfaction, reduce costs, and ultimately deliver better patient outcomes.
Companies are already seeing results, including New England Biolabs, a global leader in life sciences. New England Biolabs utilized Salesforce Health Cloud to streamline their customer service processes and improve customer satisfaction. Similarly, John Muir Health, a California-based healthcare provider, implemented Health Cloud to improve care coordination and optimize patient engagement.
However, mass change and mass success across the industry is not something to simply expect; the trust in healthcare systems across countries like the US and UK is dwindling. Health organizations are now faced with the challenge of restoring their patients’ trust, providing more empathetic care, and making sure that data security is a top priority. With tools like Health Cloud, achieving those goals becomes easier – not a guaranteed perfect fix, but a solid start.
The Health Cloud Data Model
At the core of Salesforce Health Cloud’s architecture is the Health Cloud Data Model, a flexible and extensible data model that can accommodate diverse healthcare data sources. The data model is built on top of the Salesforce Platform, leveraging standard objects such as Accounts, Contacts, and Tasks, along with custom objects specifically designed for healthcare use cases.
The Health Cloud Data Model focuses on organizing data around the patient, creating a 360-degree view that helps healthcare professionals make informed decisions and deliver personalized care. It encompasses key healthcare entities such as patient demographics, clinical data, care plans, and care teams, among others.
The data model is also designed to support interoperability and adhere to healthcare data standards like HL7 and FHIR, ensuring seamless integration with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), billing systems, and other healthcare applications. This interoperability is crucial for maintaining up-to-date and accurate patient information across different systems.
The flexibility of the Salesforce Health Cloud Data Model allows organizations to customize and extend the model to accommodate their unique requirements and workflows. This adaptability ensures that healthcare providers can leverage the power of Salesforce Health Cloud to deliver optimal patient care and achieve better outcomes, regardless of the specific challenges they face within their healthcare organization.
Top Features of Salesforce Health Cloud
The mission behind Salesforce Health Cloud is ambitious, so it needs to have some strong features to even begin delivering what it promises. Some of the key features include:
- Patient 360: This feature provides a complete, unified view of the patient, including demographics, clinical data, and interactions. By consolidating information from various sources, healthcare providers can make informed decisions and deliver personalized care.
- Care Plans: Salesforce Health Cloud allows care teams to create, track, and manage personalized care plans. Care plans can include goals, tasks, and milestones, enabling healthcare providers to monitor patient progress and adjust treatment plans as needed.
- Care Coordination: With Health Cloud, care teams can collaborate more effectively, sharing information and coordinating care across multiple providers. The platform also supports secure messaging, allowing providers to communicate with patients directly.
- Health Timeline: This interactive feature enables users to visualize a patient’s medical history, including encounters, lab results, and medications, all in one place. This intuitive view helps care teams quickly understand a patient’s history and make informed decisions.
- Einstein Analytics for Healthcare: Leveraging the power of AI, Einstein Analytics for Healthcare provides advanced insights and predictions to help healthcare organizations improve patient outcomes, streamline operations, and optimize financial performance.
Patient 360 for Health
Alongside its existing range of features, Salesforce has now announced new Patient 360 for Health innovations, powered by AI. These updates include:
- Advanced Therapy Management: This feature will help pharmaceutical companies streamline and maintain full visibility around the entire treatment process for patients.
- Salesforce Genie for Healthcare: Utilizing the power of Salesforce Genie, Salesforce Genie for Healthcare will integrate real-time clinical data, such as past and current medications, and non-clinical data, such as social determinants of health, to create a more comprehensive patient profile.
- AI-Supported Health Timeline: AI will provide an extra layer of support for the navigation and accessibility of patient records and journeys.
- Home Health: This feature will help automate the intake and scheduling process for in-home treatment, using scheduling workflows to convert prior authorizations into scheduled visits based on patient preferences.
- Data Cloud for Healthcare: This integration will enable healthcare and life sciences organizations to connect and activate clinical and non-clinical patient data from multiple sources, including electronic health records (EHR), social and behavioral data, assessments, and more into a real-time patient profile.
- MuleSoft Direct for Health Cloud: Building upon the existing strong integration, MuleSoft Direct for Health Cloud will provide out-of-the-box, FHIR-aligned connectors to access EHR data. For example, a hospital’s non-clinical team can leverage this data to submit prior authorization requests to help get patients approval for procedures covered by their insurance more quickly.
- Tableau Accelerators for Health Cloud: Harnessing the power of Tableau, Tableau Accelerators for Health Cloud are ready-to-use, intelligent dashboards for a variety of use cases, including referral analytics, risk analytics, and insights to reduce ‘no shows’. Teams can combine Tableau Accelerators with their data and customize them to fit their needs while helping them get data-driven insights faster.
How these innovations are accepted and supported by the healthcare industry will be interesting to observe, but these are very unlikely to be the last AI-supported innovations in Salesforce’s pipeline.
Integration With MuleSoft
Salesforce Health Cloud is also integrated with MuleSoft, allowing organizations to connect Health Cloud with their existing electronic health records (EHRs), billing systems, and other healthcare applications. This seamless integration ensures that users have access to accurate and up-to-date patient information.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform offers pre-built connectors and APIs, making it easier to integrate Salesforce Health Cloud with various healthcare systems. Through this integration, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data, streamline workflows, and improve decision-making. MuleSoft’s capabilities play an important role in the wider Health Cloud purpose of providing personalized, 360 degree view care.
READ MORE: What is MuleSoft? (+ How It Works With Salesforce)
Summary
Salesforce Health Cloud is not just a powerful and versatile platform for healthcare organizations, it also offers a host of additional benefits that make it an ideal choice for those looking to revolutionize their patient care and operational efficiency. By leveraging the power of Health Cloud, healthcare organizations can deliver exceptional patient experiences, streamline their processes, and ensure the security and compliance of their data.
With continuous integration with the Salesforce ecosystem, plus a wealth of developer resources and AppExchange applications, Salesforce Health Cloud is a strong contender for positive change in the healthcare industry. Although the industry has a plethora of issues to address, hopefully Health Cloud can be a strong asset in providing a bright future.
