Create A Patient Portal Using Salesforce Communities

When I think of major healthcare trends one of the most interesting is that of connected health, the idea that healthcare delivery uses technology to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor’s office. Patient – doctor interactions can now extend past visits to a more engaging ongoing relationship with providers, where patients have ready access to the same information previously only available to providers.

What does this have to do with salesforce.com you ask?

When I look at the technology required to offer a connected health solution such as a patient portal or community salesforce.com has a full solution set to create to create a compelling, secure, and engaging patient community.  Consider this table comparing required patient portal features with commercially available Salesforce features/ products. 

View a Patient Community example provided by Salesforce.com.

Put in a less feature centric way patients need a portal that can provide the following benefits:

1. Improved access to information
2. Collaboration
3. Tracking against personal goals and guidelines

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Improved Access To Information

Enabling access to patients medical records – visits, lab results, care team, etc. is table stakes for a patient portal, and without which any patient community will struggle to become widely adopted. 

Collaboration

Many people, especially with a chronic illness, take a very active part in managing their health. They want an avenue to easily converse with their provider team, and other patients with similar illnesses and interests.  They want to be able to schedule an appointment, receive automatic appointment reminders, and other have other collaboration features that allow patients to connect with their providers and others in their network more easily.

Tracking Against Personal Goals & Guidelines

There are variety of popular consumer connected devices and services, such as Strava, Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, and mySentry that track exercise activities, food, calorie intake, and glucose levels. Imagine if you could automatically bring this data into Salesforce so you and your providers could review it against previously set mutual goals, benchmark it to ‘normal’ levels, and generate alerts when data is absent or outside normal levels. Imagine how more productive your doctors visits would be by providing this information?

The business benefits to providers of a patient portal include

1. Increased patient loyalty
2. Reduced expensive hospital visits or reduce office visits
3. Lowered cost of service

Perficient is at the HIMMS conference in in Orlando this week at Booth #2035. HIMSS is to the healthcare industry what Dreamforce is to the cloud industry. To learn how Perficient can help you implement Salesforce solutions call us at 877-276-2120 or email us at sales@perficient.com.

For more information on Perficient’s expertise in healthcare technology including Connected Health, regulatory compliance, system interoperability, information exchange, and business intelligence and analytics, visit http://www.perficient.com/himss.