Personalizing Healthcare with Salesforce Data 360: A Health System’s Playbook

This is the fragmentation challenge that major health systems recognize and solve. Their answer? Utilizing a centralized data platform like Salesforce Data 360 as a central orchestration engine with a phased approach to ensure long-term returns.

The Problem of Fragmented Data

The typical provider has healthcare data scattered across EMRs (Electronic Medical Records), labs, claims databases, and call center logs. There’s a lot of it, but the volume isn't the only problem. An estimated 80% of this data is unstructured, which is extremely hard to use. That means a significant amount of the data goes unused. The result? A fragmented view of the person seeking care.

The Three-Step Unification Framework

A health system decided to fix the problem with Salesforce Data 360, implementing it as a central orchestration engine. The strategy follows a simple three-step framework:

• Collect
  Bring all disparate data sources (EHR, Claims, Marketing, Service) into Data 360.
• Connect and Unify
  Data 360 acts as the source of truth, linking all this information to create a unified constituent profile. That means it resolves duplicates and can connect service-line IDs to one person.
• Activate
  Turn the unified, single-source-of-truth profile into immediate actions, personalized journeys, and predictive insights. It operates across all engagement channels, from a marketing email to a nurse’s screen.

A Winning Playbook: Crawl, Walk, Jog

Data strategy is a long-term play and requires a phased adoption. Many health systems view a data platform like Data 360 as an ever-evolving platform, implementing it using a Crawl, Walk, Jog approach focused on defined use cases and continuous improvement. This phased implementation is key to ensuring adoption and success across a complex multi-hospital system.

Crawl, Walk, Jog Phased Implementation

Phase	Focus	Key Activities (Establishing the Foundation)
Crawl	Data & Sources, Trust	Define initial use cases, establish data sources, integrate with existing systems & secure other data sources, develop robust data governance and security plans.
Walk	Engagement, Patient Profile	Expand the data integration strategy, enrich patient profiles, enable a functional excellence team, and build out multi-channel engagement capabilities.
Jog	Evolve and Adapt	Continue to evolve, expand the connected ecosystem of technologies, and drive more advanced, real-time segmentation using Data 360 tools.

Building a Patient and Provider 360

It’s easy to think of people simply as "patients." But it’s more complicated than that. A single person can be a Patient, a Provider, a Staff member, an Employee, a Donor, or a combination of all of those things. When records are siloed, it’s hard to get the full picture of each constituent.

A central data platform addresses constituent profiles by orchestrating and unifying the records related to all roles under one individual.

This framework is crucial for connecting non-clinical demand signals (like a web visit, an ad click, or a call to the center) with clinical data (like patient records, diagnoses, and lab results). By bringing data from multiple sources into Data 360, health systems create full, activated profiles on the Healthcare Data Model, using that data to break down walls between brands and service lines. That drives higher quality acquisition and engagement.

Activating Your Data for Results

The end goal of unifying data is to actually use it. We call that data activation, and the deployment of Data 360 drives measurable outcomes for health systems. Here’s how it breaks down:

Data Activation Outcomes

Outcome Driver	Strategic Impact	Technical Excellence
Enterprise Data Readiness	Boost data maturity, consolidate data, and empower teams to make better decisions.	Flexible data model, cross-functional collaboration.
Self-Service Segmentation	Empower non-data staff (like marketing ops) to independently build and execute custom segments.	Improved non-tech self-service, real-time segmentation.
Unified Reporting	Consolidate engagement metrics across service lines, enabling a single source of truth for measuring cross-functional collaboration.	Unified patient profiles, predictable insights.
Scale Breakthrough	Successfully ingest and process incredible data volume, unlocking new analytical power.	AI-powered automation, secure integration.

Governing and Scaling a Health System

Health systems understand that scale and compliance are not afterthoughts. Rather, they’re the foundation.

• Data Retention:
  A critical piece of governance is defining clear retention policies (such as 12 months for engagement data) based on organizational and state compliance rules. While engagement data may be rotated, historical diagnostic data or specific business records can be retained or archived for longer periods as needed.
• BYOL (Bring Your Own Lake):
  To handle massive, sensitive datasets without the risk, cost, or complexity of moving them, a Secure Zero-ETL Sharing architecture can be used. This allows a connection from existing data infrastructures (like Google Cloud Platform) directly to Salesforce Data 360. The result? Hospitals can query, model, and act on data while retaining the scale and security of their enterprise data lake.

Any health system’s journey with a unified data platform is a playbook for those facing the challenge of fragmented data. By adopting the Crawl, Walk, Jog strategy, it’s much easier to build a single source of truth for personalized healthcare engagement.