Some of the key challenges that healthcare providers face today include:
- Cybersecurity risks
- Invoice and payment processing
- Lack of price transparency
- Disparate data
At a high level, these challenges can create two major problems: reduced operational efficiency and poor patient experiences. As new healthcare technologies emerge and customer expectations increase, how quickly they are addressed will greatly impact long-term success.
Whereas most providers have always been adopting new systems to improve patient care, they now find themselves with a new challenge – disparate Electronic Health Records (EHR) solutions, making it challenging to efficiently deliver care and collaborate.
Based on current trends, delivering better long-term care outcomes needs to be a key objective. As such, there is a need to use customer relationship management (CRM) that integrates EHR systems, providing a 360-degree view of patients and processes. This leads to greater market agility and better long-term relationships with patients, enabling continuous care.
For healthcare providers, such a solution comes in the form of Salesforce’s Health Cloud. In this article, we’ll dive into why prioritizing patient experience is crucial – and how Salesforce Health Cloud delivers better long-term care outcomes.
Why You Need to Prioritize Patient Experience
As a medical provider, it’s easy to fixate on the medical aspect of your practice. While it is important, it needs to be balanced with the business side. At the end of the day, patients have plenty of options to choose from when in need of non-emergency medical attention. Therefore, it’s crucial that you distinguish yourself from other practices.
Along with delivering effective and reliable medical care, a crucial element for this is the quality of the entire patient experience. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, "patient experience" is the whole range of interactions that patients have within the health care system. Such interactions include communication with providers and staff, information access, and appointment scheduling.
Your transition towards a patient-centered approach to care should begin by improving those areas. This can only be achieved by assessing how personalized the care you offer is to individual patient needs, preferences, and values. You will also need to adopt systems that allow you to deliver seamless care.
Why Salesforce’s Health Cloud is the Ideal Healthcare CRM?
Salesforce is Software as a Service (SaaS) company that offers customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Its solutions, delivered via the cloud, allow businesses to connect with customers, potential clients, and partners.
By enabling businesses to effectively track customer activity and market, among others, Salesforce has become the go-to solution for businesses. To help address the challenges that providers and patients are facing, they developed Health Cloud on the same foundations that make their business solutions successful. It has been designed to facilitate the growth of healthcare organizations by enabling them to customize the solution to suit their needs.
Health Cloud helps providers view patients as customers with values, preferences, and a right to choose their care provicder.
Healthcare providers adopt CRM solutions for their ability to collect, manage, and store data that facilitates data-driven decision-making and processes. However, Salesforce takes healthcare CRM to another level. Their CRM serves as a unified platform through which all data in your facility can be accessed, giving you a 360-degree view of your patients. More importantly, it allows you to deliver personalized care and gives patients greater control over their healthcare journeys.
With Health Cloud, caregivers do not need to worry about managing medication and appointments. When a patient visits, all the necessary information about their condition and medical history is instantly available.
Some of the things you can expect from Health Cloud include:
- A seamless system where patient data and experience are connected from acquisition to preventive care
- More accurate data
- Instant access to the most important patient data (medical history, insurance info, medications, social determinant data, and contact info)
- Better insights into individual patients and populations groups that improve preventive care and patient compliance
Health Cloud for Better Long-term Care Outcomes
As described by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), chronic diseases are conditions that last one or more years, requiring continuous medical attention, and may also limit the ability to perform daily activities. Out of ten adults in the US, six have one chronic disease, and four have two. This is why chronic conditions are the leading cause of death and disability in the US. At a cost $3.8 trillion annually, they’re also the nation’s leading driver of healthcare expenses.
Fortunately, such conditions are usually manageable if detected early. However, therein lies the challenge. In most cases, the symptoms manifest gradually and may be confused with other minor conditions. Patients either end up ignoring them if they are mild, or diagnosticians are not able to identify the disease early on.
This is where Salesforce Health Cloud presents itself as an invaluable tool for healthcare providers. Health Cloud not only assists with data collection, but also integration. With this, healthcare providers are able to unlock additional capabilities of the data within their system.
1. Comprehensive Patient View
With Health Cloud, EHR data is accessible in one system. This more detailed view of the patient enables:
- Richer patient profiles
- Collaborative care network and health timelines
- Third-party data from medical devices
By gaining such a comprehensive patient view with accurate details on their present and past medical status, healthcare providers are able to offer better care. In relation to long-term conditions, they are positioned to make early and accurate diagnoses.
2. Segment and Manage Patient Populations
Beyond offering you a comprehensive patient view, Health Cloud allows you to segment and manage patient populations. This enables detailed insight into how various patient populations are affected by specific conditions, and the unique symptoms they display.
Data on how different groups are affected or the variation in symptoms displayed allows you to develop tailored diagnoses. This facilitates early breakthroughs in methods of diagnosing and treating conditions. Instead of looking at the patient as just an individual, you’ll be able to associate their symptoms with the unique markers of their demographics.
One of the key features of Salesforce Health Cloud that allows you to make quicker and smarter decisions is the ‘Today’ page. It provides a 360-degree view of the most important patient and population tasks. For instance, it allows you to send alerts to specific segments, such as cancer patients, via a single and secure private message.
For patients with a chronic disease, these capabilities could be the difference between manageable conditions or death.
3. Smarter Patient Engagement and Management
Whether hospitalized or not, patients with long-term conditions require close monitoring and management. However, this is often challenging for healthcare providers. Health Cloud helps by:
- Assessing patient needs and prioritizing tasks
- Mapping professional and personal caregiver networks
Such features allow you to ensure patients can access care if and as needed.
4. Secure Data
One of the biggest threats to healthcare technology is cybercrime. In order to receive care, patients share medical and other crucial personal information with providers. Data leaks not only compromise their safety, but it exposes providers to hefty non-compliance fines and legal action.
There have been over 2,100 healthcare data breaches in the US since 2009. Furthermore, 30% of all large data breaches affect hospitals. With these statistics in mind, there is a clear need to take cybersecurity measures seriously. Health Cloud’s access controls for HIPAA compliance make it easier to manage and secure healthcare data.
For enhanced security, Salesforce Shield is another tool you can use in conjunction with Health Cloud. It helps healthcare providers maintain electronic protected health information (ePHI) in an encrypted format that’s only accessible by authorized users. You will also be able to monitor how users access and use data and retain an audit trail.
Impact of a Positive Patient Experience on Your Facility
Today, the responsibility of a healthcare provider goes beyond providing care…providers are focused on delivering consumer-grade experiences, creating patient journeys, and becoming a trusted health advocates. This new focus holds significant positive outcomes for health facilities.
1. Increased Patient Engagement
For your healthcare facility to succeed, excellent medical services must be accompanied by impeccable customer service. This is one of the key areas where providers are failing. Data indicates that 47% of patients are dissatisfied with their healthcare experience as they feel institutions focus more on industry matters than their needs. Additionally, a Penrod research study confirmed that 2 in 3 consumers would consider leaving their healthcare provider for better digital experiences.
Improving patient journeys begins with viewing each patient as a unique individual and offering need-based care. This should be accompanied by excellent customer service throughout the facility. Being a service-based business, this can significantly reduce patient churn. And the finincial outcome is not insignificant – an increase in customer retention of 5% can increase your profits from anywhere between 25% and 95%.
Taking measures to improve patient experience also benefits your medical exploits. It lays the foundation for building trusting relationships with patients. As a result, they will be more comfortable communicating and providing information, which is greatly improved your ability to offer care.
2. Increased Revenue
At the end of the day, revenues are what will keep your facility running. Improving patient experience helps increase your revenues in two key ways. First, insurance companies are increasingly taking into account patient experience when structuring contractual agreements. In the past few years, provider and patient arrangements explicitly based on such have become common.
Ultimately, the greatest value in improving patient experience comes in the form of retaining customers. Along with being cheaper than getting new clients, customer retention allows you to unlock the lifetime value of patients. Considering that the lifetime value of a patient is approximately $1.4 million, increasing customer retention can significantly increase revenues in the long run.
3. Improved Reputation
At times, the success of an organization depends more on how consumers perceive it rather than the quality of services it offers. As a medical care provider, your skills may not be relevant if consumers have a bad perception of your facility.
This is why patient experience is crucial. Other than how they present your brand within their circles via word of mouth, patients also leave online reviews about your services. Instead of waiting to do damage control after receiving scathing reviews, you can deliver an exceptional patient experience. With this, you will also gain a loyal army of marketers.
Get the Support You Need
Delivering better long-term care outcomes can significantly increase the chances of your medical facility standing tall above the competition. Salesforce Health Cloud is undoubtedly an invaluable tool in such efforts.
At Penrod, we assist healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes and improve business performance through innovative Salesforce solutions. Contact us today to see how we can help you deliver better long-term patient outcomes with the power of Salesforce.