Creating Better Healthcare Experiences with Data Cloud One

Salesforce Data 360

Where Healthcare Data Gets a New Home

Imagine you have a patient named Jane. Her EHR has her clinical history, your marketing platform has her email address and a record of her newsletter subscriptions, and your claims system has her billing information. These are all separate pieces of Jane. If a care manager, a marketer, and a billing specialist all look her up, they’ll each see a different, incomplete version of her.

Salesforce Data 360 changes that. It’s a powerful tool that brings all those scattered pieces together. It ingests data from your EHR, ERP, claims systems, and marketing platforms. Then, it puts it all together.

That’s what we call identity resolution. Data 360 figures out that all these different records are, in fact, Jane. It creates a single, unified, 360-degree profile for her.

With a complete picture of Jane, you can:

Personalize Engagement
No more generic emails. For instance, you can send her a message about a flu shot reminder based on her age and location, or a post-op survey that is specific to her recent procedure.

Improve Care Coordination
Your care team can see her whole history of appointments, communications, and clinical notes in one place, ensuring they’re always on the same page.

Power Advanced Analytics
You can analyze your entire patient population to identify trends, improve marketing effectiveness, and find opportunities to serve your community better.

Simply put, Data 360 is the engine that transforms disjointed data into meaningful, actionable insights. In this example, Salesforce Data 360 ingests data from EHR, ERP, claims, and marketing systems to create unified member profiles.

The Next Level: Data Cloud One

Now, what if your organization is a bit more complex? Maybe you’ve grown through mergers and acquisitions, or you’re a large health system with multiple departments and facilities, each running on its own Salesforce org. That’s a common use case, because many hospitals run a different Salesforce org for each function. For instance, the service team runs on Service Cloud, the marketing team runs on Marketing Cloud, the clinical team runs on Health Cloud, and so on.

But while having different orgs makes sense from a functional perspective, it also means that you’ve got a dozen different versions of Jane, each living in a separate system. Having multiple orgs is a common and complicated problem, and it's exactly why Salesforce built Data Cloud One.

Data Cloud One takes the power of Data 360 and scales it to the enterprise level. It's an architecture designed for organizations with multiple Salesforce orgs.

Here’s how it works: you designate one of your Salesforce orgs as the "Home Org." The Home Org becomes the central hub, the command center for all your data. The other orgs, also called the "Companion Orgs", connect to it.

Data Cloud One then pulls in and reconciles all that data from every connected org. It’s like gathering all those different puzzle pieces from all your different puzzle boxes into a single, massive box. But instead of a mess, it creates a single, master version of the truth. This architecture enables:

A Single Source of Truth
Regardless of the originating organization, Data Cloud One ensures you have a single, clean, and accurate record for each individual.

Consistent Identity
It provides consistent identity resolution and deduplication across your entire enterprise. No more "Jane Smith" in one org and "J. Smith" in another.

Secure Data Sharing
It provides a secure, governed way to share data between business units, allowing for collaboration without compromising data integrity or security.

Data Cloud One is not just about keeping data organized. It's about enabling a connected, enterprise-wide healthcare constituent strategy. It’s critical for large, complex healthcare organizations that need to operate as a single, unified entity.

Here’s an example of how Data 360 and Data Cloud One could work for a patient acquisition use case with Salesforce. In this example, Data Cloud One Home Org connects to multiple Companion Orgs, centralizing data ingestion, identity resolution, and activation.

Tips for Implementing Data Cloud One

Data Cloud One sounds great on paper, but the reality is that implementations can get complicated. Follow these best practices to make sure you’re setting up Data Cloud One for success from the get-go.

Start With a Clear Vision

Start your Data 360 and Data Cloud One implementation with a strong strategy. That means you need to align it with specific business objectives, and it’s OK if there’s more than one. For example, Data Cloud One can solve patient acquisition, service line growth, provider credentialing, and supply chain use cases.

Then, make sure that vision aligns with leadership from clinical, marketing, IT, and operations to define what success looks like.

Prioritize Data Governance and Security

With the wrong configuration, automation has the potential to cause serious data security concerns. That’s why you need to build all flows, storage, and integrations with a HIPAA framework in mind. That means encryption to protect data in transit and at rest, access controls that keep data in the right hands, and audit trails that monitor activity.

Also, make sure to take into account the systems you’re activating data towards. If it’s a platform without a business associate agreement (BAA), you need to either redact PHI or anonymize it with tools like Penrod Destinations. Common examples include Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta and Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Enforce Data Quality

The success of your implementation depends on data quality. To start, make sure to understand the scope of your implementation. Remember in step one when you defined your vision with a use case? Make sure to limit ingestion to the data necessary to solve that.

Then, use identity resolution and deduplication rules to create complete patient profiles from EHRs, ERPs, CRMs, marketing tools, and data warehouses. Furthermore, you want to make sure addresses, dates, and medical specialties are normalized for consistency retroactively and at the point of entry.

Segment with Precision

The true strength of Data 360 lies in its audience segmentation capabilities. To maximize its potential, ensure you pre-define segments based on demographic, clinical, behavioral, and engagement data. Tailor these segments to align with the specific use cases you’re addressing. These segments can then be further enriched with calculated insights and propensity models from Salesforce Einstein to identify higher value constituents within those segments. Then, test and refine regularly to ensure accuracy on an ongoing basis.

Activate and Orchestrate

Set up seamless connectors for Marketing Cloud, Health Cloud, Snowflake, and more to enable smooth, bi-directional data flows. Map out and automate key patient journeys—think new patient onboarding, appointment reminders, and post-discharge follow-ups—to keep things running like clockwork.

Test, Test, Test

Test every integration, data flow, and user journey in a sandbox or staging environment before going live. No shortcuts mean no surprises. Give your end users, admins, and super-users the tools they need with hands-on training and clear, actionable documentation. Once everything’s up and running, set the stage for long-term success with ongoing support, maintenance, and optimization.

Keep it Scalable

When expanding to new specialities or service lines, use standardized connectors and repeatable ingestion processes. Make sure to document all field mappings, data sources, and normalization logic. That’ll keep your platform maintainable. Then, regularly audit your workflows for technical debt and optimize for new business needs.

Our Final Take

At the end of the day, Penrod sees Salesforce Data 360 as the engine for constituent unification, powering 360-degree engagement and analytics. For large, complex organizations, Data Cloud One takes this even further, integrating multiple Salesforce orgs into a single, governed data ecosystem.