Community Outreach with Salesforce

The Problem

Community outreach has evolved. From its earliest roots in philanthropy in the late 19th to early 20th century, it has entered a digital phase characterized by value-based care and the social determinants of health. With that evolution have come new opportunities, but also new data, performance, and compliance challenges.

Data

To start, many hospitals struggle with data visibility. Data is scattered throughout various platforms in the tech stack, including EHRs, ERPs, and marketing systems. Outreach is only meaningful when personalized…and personalized outreach starts with data. Without a centralized platform to create complete patient profiles, it’s impossible to personalize outreach based on key factors like demographics, location, psychographics, and social determinants of health. Why? Because EHRs alone aren’t enough to solve the problem. According to JMIR Medical Informatics, 96% of acute care hospitals have implemented EHRs, but less than half are fully integrated with other clinical platforms. The result? Disparate data and incomplete patient profiles.

Performance Measurement

Hospitals also struggle to understand which community outreach programs have the biggest impact. These range from marketing measures like impressions and conversions to clinical measures like early detections, vaccinations, or screenings. Repeating success or discontinuing ineffective programs is difficult without clear insights into each campaign. Hospitals can’t make evidence-based decisions about where to allocate resources, meaning they may underspend on effective programs and overspend on ones that aren’t working.

Compliance

Compliance impacts all hospital operations but is especially important for public-facing programs like community outreach. Depending on the operating model or location, hospitals must comply with regulations like the Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA). Adherence relies on gathering accurate, consistent data within tight deadlines. Without an automated process, hospitals face huge administrative burdens and potential penalties.

The Solution

Community outreach depends on addressing hospitals' data, measurement, and compliance challenges. Let’s examine how Salesforce Health Cloud and Marketing Cloud can help.

Salesforce Health Cloud unifies data from across the healthcare tech stack, including EHRs, ERPs, and marketing tools. Unified data creates complete patient profiles that include demographic, socioeconomic, health, behavioral, psychographic, and social determinants of health that enable specific segmentation. Marketers can create additional segments to discover at-risk communities and gaps in outreach. Marketing Cloud can take those segments and execute highly targeted, personalized outreach over multiple channels, including email, SMS, and direct mail. With highly specific campaigns focused on preventative care, maternal health, early detection, chronic disease management, and more, patients will get the information they need to live healthier lives.

Custom dashboards connect data across the tech stack to measure each program's impact. From marketing metrics to clinical outcomes, every campaign is measurable, and hospitals can make data-driven decisions that drive better outreach strategies. Since everything is reportable, teams can report on their outreach efforts and document community benefit activities for compliance.

Outreach has always been an important part of community health, from its roots in charitable giving to the modern data challenges of value-based care. With Salesforce Health Cloud, hospitals have never been more equipped to overcome the challenges of community and financial health.