Many hospitals and doctors and patients are looking for better ways to connect with each other. Based on my work with payers, they often want to engage more with their members so they can make good healthcare choice. Patients often want to have a sense of community, especially those dealing with chronic conditions and diseases. Doctors are naturally helpful and often welcome ways to help provide greater and better information to patients. It seems natural for all these people to want to have online communities.
However, aside from some general discussion forums that are available that are often started by patients, there are few communities available between doctors and patients, or patients and payers, or hospitals and patients. Security and HIPAA laws probably dampen the demand because everyone but patients don’t want to be fined by the federal government when private data is shared inadvertently.
Salesforce is of course interested in promoting communities using their Community Cloud. At Dreamforce, I’m attending a session on how all of these parties can truly have secure communities in the cloud.
Health Leads talked about their platform. Health Leads is all about connecting patients with basic resources like food, shelter, etc as part of their overall care. The number one predictor of lifespan is your zip code or your economic condition. Low income patients may not get their health improved solely with medications. Non-medical factors may actually have more impact on health – for example living in a house full of mold may override the use of inhalers for asthma patients.
So what do you do when you get an influx of 16m new patients into Medicaid, but have no way to alter their non-medical needs. Health Leads created a Salesforce Community to track patients non-medical situations and feeds that information to the healthcare providers or a social worker or case manager. Doctors can then prescribe the patient participate in Health Leads where those non-medical needs can be met.
The Salesforce community allowed Health Leads to double the number of patients they have been able to serve. Here are other benefits they realized from the Community Cloud:
- Provide a great interface to get information about a client or a patient so advocates can see what’s going on with their patients.
- Collaborate between Health Leads and other community resources. With thousands of local resources, the platform provides a way to keep everyone up to date on the available resources. Advocates can collaborate with each to solve issues.
- Use mobile devices, which is huge for people who have to go out to the patients in their own homes. They use text messaging as well to connect with patients who have access to cell phones. Patients who used text messaging were 4x more likely to stay engaged with Health Leads
- Connect providers with analytics about Health Leads and their clients. The analytics have provided a wealth of new information about non-medical information for providers.
Deloitte Digital presented their solution called Deloitte Member Connect. Their platform is addressing the need of health plans or payers. Payers have traditionally had low customer experience scores and generally have to compete on lower costs. The average touchpoint for members with their health plan is 1.4 touches per year. So in order to drive more engagement, health plans must promote more member interaction. Deloitte’s Member Connect uses Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to drive more member engagement and uses other components with the Salesforce platform including Sales Cloud, Community Cloud to build a complete view of the member.
Deloitte demoed their system being used for enrolling a member in a health plan after gathering some profile information and then displayed a personalized video for the new member. The community cloud was used to schedule a meeting with a health coach. Behind the scenes, Deloitte had to build quite a number of features to integrate all of the components together, but the platform provides a nice comprehensive solution for a health payer.
