Salesforce EHR Integration Checklist

Why EHR + CRM?

Communication with patients is a critical aspect of medical care. In the modern age, patients connect with their healthcare providers over the phone, text, email, automated scheduling tools, and even virtual meetings. The flow of information between healthcare practices and patients should be constant, easy, and integrated with the patient's current health records. This is why integrating your electronic health record (EHR) system with a CRM like Salesforce is a growing trend among providers in the healthcare industry.

After all, EHRs and CRMs have different functions. Here's our breakdown.

Salesforce makes it possible to engage patients with EHR data like medical histories, medications, test results, clinical notes, and diagnoses. Integrating your EHR with Salesforce makes patient data actionable, empowering communication and automation to improve patient experiences, streamline clinical processes, and drive down the cost of care.

Penrod is here to help guide your EHR and Salesforce integration, ensuring a smooth upgrade for your healthcare practice, patient satisfaction, and secure implementation. Let's dive into our Salesforce and EHR integration checklist.

Salesforce Integration EHRs

Sure, Salesforce is highly customizable "customer" relationship management (CRM) platform. But framing it within the context of "customers" isn't always accurate for healthcare use cases. In this case, your customers are your patients, and the relationships you develop improves quality of care. Salesforce is capable of integrating with most popular EHR systems, including:

• Epic
• Cerner
• AthenaHealth
• NextGen Healthcare
• Allscripts
• eClinicalWorks

Each of these EHR platforms provides the foundation for patient care, but the data is intended for clinical settings. Through Salesforce integration, you can put that data to use.

Integration can be complex, so we're here to help create a plan for integrating your EHR with Salesforce Health Cloud. Here are the steps every successful integration should consider.

1. Define Integration Goals

Recognizing your goals should be the first step because they'll drive the integration process.

Your goals will determine the functionalities and data flows between Salesforce and your EHR. They will also define success measures when the integration is complete.

Let's start with the most common goals we've seen providers set for their EHR and Salesforce integrations.

1. Improving Patient Engagement
   Measured in patient interaction, commitment to personal health plans, regular appointments, and follow-up communications.
2. Optimizing Clinical Workflows
   Successful if workflows require less time and effort with more efficient outcomes.
3. Unifying Patient Data
   Achieved when your communication platform supplies up-to-date medical information relevant to each task from the EHR.
4. Improve Patient Scheduling
   Unified data helps improve the timing of appointments, follow-ups, and treatments.
5. Better Caregiver Collaboration
   Patient care teams can keep in touch and stay up-to-date through unified health records and contact management, even in the field.
6. Secure Patient Portal
   Provide your patients with a secure way to view and manage their health information, book appointments, and contact their care team.
7. Remote Patient Management
   Keep in touch with patients receiving care remotely, especially for at-home care.

2. Identify Compliance Requirements

Compliance is a critical factor for any healthcare software implementation. This is particularly true when integrating your EHR with an engagement platform like Salesforce. In the healthcare industry, Salesforce HIPAA compliance relates primarily to data security and controlled access to patient health information.

Access Controls and Permissions

Data access controls determine who can view which aspects of patient healthcare data. One of the reasons EHR is often isolated is to protect patient information. However, Salesforce Health Cloud provides the access controls necessary to fine-tune HIPAA-compliant access and permissions.

• Admin-Safe Data Data that any admin staff can safely handle, such as appointment scheduling and billing reminders.
• Patient Care Team Health record data access is granted only to medical professionals assigned to a patient's care team.
• Medications Medication information is provided only to a patient's care team and pharmacist.
• Personally Granted Permission Patients may grant official access to their health information to named persons, such as a parent, spouse, or Power of Attorney.

Outside of specific granted access, controls operate under a restriction-by-default policy to ensure patient health data is always protected in compliance with HIPAA data security regulations.

3. Identify Data Security Requirements

In addition to access control, your EHR and Salesforce integration will need to meet strict data security standards. The security of software integrations rely on the standards of both software solutions and the strength of their data-sharing integration.

• Risk assessment must be conducted to identify potential security vulnerabilities. Each vulnerability identified must be addressed to ensure that any outside source cannot access health records.
• Clear policies for data security must be defined in terms of software and human protocol. These policies must be followed carefully throughout integration, and training materials must be created for team members to ensure security is maintained when the software is used.
• Salesforce Shield offers an accessible toolkit to ensure encrypted data fields and audit history so that you can keep all health records managed by Salesforce secure from unauthorized access. Encryption ensures that data cannot be decoded or read in transit and at rest.
• Create a plan to handle any new compliance requirements in the future, preparing your data security for a robust and adaptable implementation.

4. Mapping Fields

Data fields are where the data in your EHR will need to match up with data in your Salesforce platform. Examples of fields include a patient's name, age, birthday, insurance provider and number, contact information, and so on.

Mapping your data fields is essential to creating a source of truth in Salesforce. Both the ERH and Salesforce platforms share unified data that ensures patient care routines are always up-to-date in each platform. If you're looking for a deep dive, explore the Salesforce Health Cloud data fields to understand the field available in Health Cloud.

Here are some basic considerations for mapping fields:

• Understand One-Way vs Bi-Directional Fields
  Start by identifying which fields need one-way vs bi-directional data flows.
• Understand Field Types
  Always ensure that matching fields share a consistent field type. Field types include integers, strings, dates, and percentages.
• Understand Event Updates
  Ensure that data field updates are triggered by the correct events both in the EHR and Salesforce Health Cloud.

5. Select Integration Platforms or Partners

Sure, it 's possible to create a Salesforce EHR integration with custom code. However, this level of effort is not necessary. Salesforce is a widely used platform with integration tools that can help streamline your EHR and Salesforce Health Cloud integration process. One such middleware solution is Mulesoft, which makes the process more accessible, scalable, and helps prevent mistakes by providing a pre-structured framework.

You can also ensure a successful integration by working with an experienced healthcare partner like Penrod. We can help to ensure the process is smooth and professionally handled, applying our expertise to the critical steps of security, access control, and data field mapping. Working with an integration partner streamlines integration, minimizes errors, and helps you avoid downtime. A professional team can also ensure you meet data security and compliance requirements.

Those considering an integration partner can gain confidence by requesting references and case studies regarding integrating your EHR system.

6. Create Integration Plan

With everything prepared, you are ready to lay out the steps of your integration plan. Create a timeline that reflects the amount of time each integration stage should take and the overall time that the project should require.

Assign roles and responsibilities and set aside the resources that will be necessary to complete the integration. Remember to prepare a sandbox environment where your integration can tested without causing downtime for your healthcare practice.

Every integration plan should also have a "rollback plan" which can allow you to restore data, structures, and settings to their previous configuration in case something goes wrong. This can be accomplished with the combination of clean backups and a separate test environment.

7. User Enablement

Prepare to empower your healthcare staff to use the newly integrated software system. Training is often overlooked, but it will be essential in taking full advantage of your newly expanded software capabilities.

• Prepare for Training
  Develop centrally located training materials and set up live training sessions. Provide materials for solo and group learning, practice handling the data, and opportunities to test the new workflows.
• Center of Excellence
  Establish a Salesforce Center of Excellence (COE). This is a team of experts who help support the integration process.
• Subject Matter Expert
  Appoint or contract with subject matter experts (SMEs) to guide the process and answer questions
• Key Stakeholders
  Appoint or identify key stakeholders to provide ongoing support and advocacy.
• Gather Feedback
  As you introduce training and implementation, be attentive to feedback from users and adapt to create optimal workflows for everyone on your team.

8. Test the Integration

Always test your integration before you go live. Create a sandbox test environment where you can run tests and practice working with the integrated systems before putting the platforms to work as part of your healthcare practice.

• First, ensure the data has been successfully transferred.
• Then, conduct unit tests, system tests, and user acceptance testing (UAT) to understand how your integrated system will work in real-world scenarios.
• Run security penetration tests and data access control tests to ensure your security measures meet compliance standards.
• Run stress tests to ensure your servers and combined software can stand up to simultaneous use and a level of activity that mirrors your healthcare practice activities.

9. Continuously Optimize

Last but never least, commit to continual optimization. Use monitoring and analytics software to track performance, usage data, and overall efficiency. Regular and ongoing maintenance is also crucial for a successful long-term integration.

Keep your software up-to-date, audit regularly, and have a team ready to make improvements to get the best possible results from integrating your EHR with Salesforce Health Cloud.