What is Salesforce Health Cloud and Does Your Company Need It?

If your healthcare organization is constantly evolving, sooner or later you will need to resort to IT integration services aimed at implementing a scalable cloud-based solution to store all your patient information safely and in one place. This way, no matter how quickly your client base grows, your medical staff will always have a complete understanding of the patients’ medical histories and will be able to provide effective treatment without any delays or confusion. 

One of the most popular solutions that covers these tasks is Salesforce Health Cloud, which can be deployed as a part of Salesforce implementation services. Below, we’ll answer the question, “What is Salesforce Health Cloud?”, discuss the key features of this product, and also consider its advantages that set it apart from competitive solutions.

Thus, medical organizations that have decided to implement Salesforce Health Cloud in their workflows can provide their patients with a personalized approach without any hitches or delays in the provision of services.

Salesforce Health Cloud Architecture

Let’s see how the Salesforce Health Cloud architecture is arranged. It consists of:

• Leads, accounts, contacts, person accounts, cases and activities 
• Goals and problems, provided by managed package 
• Salesforce shield for PHI Compliance 
• Custom EHR Tables, provided by managed packages 
• Payer, member, and plan coverage benefit 
• Customer community for patients 
• Utilization management 
• Salesforce Lightning Console 

Thus, Salesforce Health Cloud architecture provides the following benefits for healthcare organizations of different sizes:

• Scalability with the provision of cloud resources and computing power as the organization where it is implemented grows;
• Security in accordance with current healthcare regulations and international standards for the collection, storage, and management of sensitive patient data;
• Flexibility and adaptability to the goals, needs, and processes of a specific organization, achievable through the customizability of all Salesforce Health Cloud features;
• Compatibility with third-party solutions thanks to an extensive list of available integrations and migration options (specifically, from legacy EHR systems).

Salesforce Health Cloud Capabilities

Now let’s look at the main Salesforce Health Cloud use cases.

End-to-end Health Services Management

Salesforce Health Cloud provides seamless integration with clinical data from electronic health records (EHR) and other healthcare software, allowing companies in this sector to plan, manage, and implement multiple patient care plans. You can get a more detailed answer to the question, “What is Salesforce integration?” in this article.

Care Program Management

The care program management model enabled by Salesforce Health Cloud helps organizations increase patient engagement in the care process. Therefore, this use case is aimed at improving the quality of medical outcomes.

Claims Management

Salesforce Health Cloud also allows companies to effectively manage patient feedback by consolidating all information related to their grievances and wishes in one place.

Working with Clinical Data

Salesforce Health Cloud recently implemented a new clinical data model, providing greater compatibility with relevant standards of medical data exchange like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) v4.0. This cloud-based solution significantly expands the capabilities previously available through standard EHR fields (please note that the EHR integration option is still available).

Codes for Diagnostics and Procedures

Data Loader provides the ability to import sets of codes for quick requests for various medical procedures and diagnostics. In particular, having the proper rights, with their help, your medical staff in healthcare centers will be able to quickly approve a treatment plan.

Insurance

Salesforce Health Cloud allows healthcare organizations to implement various models for payment of medical services, collecting relevant information about patients, and automating the process of making informed decisions on calculating the cost of medical services.

Intelligent Appointment Management

Salesforce Health Cloud architecture supports integrations with customer appointment management systems, coordinating individual departments of healthcare organizations (such as call centers, doctors, etc.) among themselves to quickly share relevant data.

Home Care Programs

Using the built-in capabilities of this platform, your Salesforce deployment specialists can implement various models for managing patient appointments and those related to their treatment outside the clinic.

Intelligent Sales

Intelligent Sales helps sales departments plan and increase sales, as well as manage resources, which can increase the resulting bill.

Supplier Network Management

Supplier network management ensures the gradual scaling of these networks with minimal resource costs. Here, your medical staff will be able to combine all the necessary contact information to choose treatment plans for patients that best suit their needs and budget.

Integration of Wearable Devices

To provide medical services that involve round-the-clock monitoring of the patient’s health, you may find it useful to integrate with wearable devices—the platform will provide a centralized collection of this data, which you can subject to further analysis and processing to obtain a complete picture of the current condition of patients.

Social Determinants

This capability provides medical staff with all the necessary information about barriers and determinants of health and intervention for specific patients.

Utilization Management

This platform can be used to interpret, administer, and explain health plan medical policies. With its help, your employees will be able to more quickly and accurately determine the pricing policy for your healthcare organization’s services, taking into account insurance aspects. As a result, your patients will be able to receive medical care at the appropriate time and in the amount they actually need.

Benefit Verification

To complete our list of Salesforce Health Cloud use cases, we propose to consider this platform as a tool for benefit checks, calculating how much a particular patient’s benefits cover the services and products received. 

Benefits of Salesforce Health Cloud

To sum up the above, we can highlight the next benefits of Salesforce Health Cloud.

Medical Services without Delays

Thanks to Salesforce Health Cloud implementation, medical specialists are able to take their patients from awareness of their problems to full recovery, paying attention to them and providing the necessary services at each stage of interaction. At the same time, they will always have at hand a comprehensive picture of the condition of each patient with up-to-date data. 

Moreover, if necessary, they can always contact their patients to clarify information. Therefore, since all aspects of interaction and their results are recorded in centralized cloud storage, this eliminates delays in the provision of services associated with the irrelevance or lack of needed information.

Centralized Source of Patient Data 

The main value of Salesforce Health Cloud for healthcare organizations is secured cloud storage with the ability to implement different data structures within its architecture and organize different types of connections between them. 

The simplest model of such a structure is a patient’s health record, which includes anamnesis, symptoms of the current disease, doctor’s appointments, visit schedules, data recorded by wearable devices, as well as individual parameters (patient needs) that may be critical in stimulating sales.

At the same time, data sharing from the cloud can be carried out in real time through API and advanced data integration tools. In this way, each service will occur solely on the basis of up-to-date information about patients, which will have a positive impact in the future on their loyalty to a specific healthcare organization.

Advanced Patient Engagement

Salesforce Health Cloud provides access to information about the course of treatment for all parties in this process, including the patients themselves. Thus, your patients will be able to be more involved in their recovery.

Moreover, with this solution, they can independently find out data about the dynamics of treatment and test results in centralized digital data sources without wasting their doctors’ time on additional visits and calls.

Personalization 

Today, a personalized approach to each customer is a key aspect of ensuring the competitiveness of any business, and the healthcare industry is no exception. The team behind Salesforce Health Cloud understands this and provides companies that have chosen this platform with comprehensive capabilities to create a personalized experience for each individual patient.

For example, the Health Cloud platform provides instant centralized access to patient data, from their symptoms to costs of medical procedures and services already received. Thanks to this, companies operating in the medical and healthcare sector are able to provide their services even faster and more accurately, which can be critical for patients with borderline health conditions and important for those who are used to choosing the best for themselves.

Easy Appointment Scheduling and Booking

Making an appointment and booking a time for a visit can be a real challenge for clients of large medical centers and organizations where world-famous specialists work. So that such organizations do not have to sacrifice the comfort of their patients, they can offer them simple and fast online appointment booking using the AppExchange solution, which is part of Salesforce Health Cloud.

Seamless Payment Experience

Since the pricing of services in medical organizations is quite complex as it involves adding the costs of various types of procedures and drugs—as well as taking into account benefits and insurance of patients—calculating the final bill that the patient will receive can be quite tedious and time-consuming. 

In turn, Salesforce Health Cloud will save your patients from the need to languish in queues and waste their time waiting for a check, providing them with instant bills and numerous payment options for services received. As for healthcare organizations themselves, such automation will help them avoid mistakes and close profit gaps.

Superior Security

The following solutions are responsible for the security of data and processes carried out within this cloud platform:

• End-to-end encryption of user data. All user data within the Salesforce Health Cloud architecture is encrypted with an HSM-based key derivation system. Thus, even if attackers gain access to the system, without proper user rights, they will not be able to obtain the data they need.
• Event monitoring. Salesforce Health Cloud features advanced mechanisms for monitoring user activity, from logins to requesting access to certain data and making changes. This creates an additional information base for the company’s IT department to promptly identify suspicious activity within the system.
• Field audit trail. All changes made to the system are tracked in a specialized log. Thus, Salesforce Health Cloud simplifies the procedures for investigating system vulnerabilities that lead to data leaks.
• Role-based access control. Salesforce Health Cloud allows organizations to differentiate user roles, allowing access only to the data needed to perform their job responsibilities. This approach increases the level of data confidentiality, revealing the most private records only to dedicated company employees.
• Two-factor authentication. Salesforce Health Cloud supports 2FA, an additional security tool for company employee accounts. In particular, to gain access to the system, in addition to filling out standard authorization fields such as login and password, employees will also need to enter a code from an SMS message or answer a phone call.

Salesforce Health Cloud Pricing 

You can choose one of four Salesforce Health Cloud pricing plans:

• Enterprise
• Unlimited
• Life Sciences Enterprise
• Life Sciences Unlimited

The first two plans are characterized by a full range of features, such as:

• Clinical and Insurance Data Models 
• Virtual Care 
• Social Determinants 
• Care Plan Customisation and Management 
• Utilization Management 
• Assessments 
• Advanced Therapy Management

In turn, the last two plans have only the last feature from the above list: Advanced Therapy Management.

Final Thoughts

Summing up, implementation of Salesforce Health Cloud:

• Allows healthcare organizations to select the most appropriate data model and seamlessly migrate it from legacy accounting systems and electronic medical records
• Provides an expanded set of tools for automating workflows in medical centers, as well as tools aimed at optimizing cooperation with partners
• Provides better patient care by structuring and automatically updating their data within the entire IT infrastructure of medical organizations
• Offers convenient and secure online transactions tools

Thus, with understanding the features of Salesforce Health Cloud, you can now make an informed decision about whether you need to implement this solution or not. If you’re looking for experienced specialists to help your business get the most out of this product, feel free to contact us. We will deploy and configure Salesforce Health Cloud according to your individual business needs and goals, choosing the most cost-effective set of functions and implementing automation exactly where it is needed. You can also check our portfolio with Salesforce system success stories to be more confident in our expertise.