I attended several sessions at Dreamforce this week focused on the Salesforce Health Cloud product and came away impressed by the momentum of this product since its GA release earlier this year at HIMSS in February 2016. Highlights from the sessions are as follows:
Health Cloud puts the patient in the center of the care universe and is built from the ground up with the idea that the future of healthcare is about patient engagement throughout the care continuum. Health Cloud enables patients to engage in their care before, during, and after clinical visits in ways never before possible. The vision is to improve the quality of provider care while simultaneously improving the patient’s adherence to care plans thus reducing healthcare costs while also improving care outcomes. Accomplishing this grand objective is no small feat, but the Salesforce platform is uniquely positioned to address this problem and is off to a very promising start.
Health Cloud continues to evolve with considerable functional enhancements that Salesforce has delivered in the Summer and Winter releases. Key product capabilities include the following:
- Single view of patient comprised of Clinical, Claims, and Patient-generated
- Timeline view of patient data (episodes, prescriptions, office visits, correspondence, etc.) with the ability to filter for specific information related to a provider, a condition, a care plan,
- Relationship View of all the parties related to a Patient (Clinics, Labs, Doctors, Pharmacies, etc.)
- Care Plan Templates to facilitate evidence-based care assessments and generation of Care Plans
- Extensive collaboration capabilities that enable omni-channel engagement between the patient and their providers, between providers themselves, and between the providers and any approved caregivers for the patient (e.g. the spouse of a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease)
The vision of Health Cloud is to break through the legacy of silo CRMs and EMRs common in healthcare to achieve engagement, engagement, engagement. Lack of connectivity, mobility, and collaboration are the obstacles facing every provider, and Salesforce is providing a paradigm shift in connectivity to enable the future of care. Health Cloud enables connectivity to increase patient education and proactive care, improve patient adherence to care plans, and enable more effective and timely provider engagement, all focused on achieving higher quality, personalized, patient-centric care.
As a testament to the overall capabilities of the Salesforce platform and the Health Cloud product there are several companies already building out next-generation EMR products on top of Salesforce. I had the opportunity to visit with a company called Healium that is going to market with its next-generation EMR that leverages multiple Salesforce products including Health Cloud, Communities, Salesforce1, and multiple AppExchange products to accelerate delivery. They are extremely pleased thus far with the custom development they have done in Lightning to extend Health Cloud functionality. Healium reported that the selection of the Salesforce platform was made after evaluating 80 different products and technologies in the marketplace, which is testament to the readiness of the Salesforce platform to be a major player in the Healthcare and Life Sciences marketplace for years to come. Stay tuned!
