Patient Self-Service with Salesforce

Despite the popularity of self-service through chatbots, many hospitals are holding back. Why? Because healthcare is different. Complicated integration, compliance, and safety challenges stand in the way. General self-service platforms that work well in retail may not meet healthcare challenges. However, where point solutions fail, tailored solutions are a perfect fit for hospitals. Let’s take a look at how the Salesforce platform helps overcome these challenges.

The Challenges of Patient Engagement

Integration Challenges

Patients need answers to all kinds of questions: Why is this on my bill? What does this lab result mean? When’s my next appointment? The answers to these questions are spread across the entire healthcare tech stack in EHRs, billing systems, and scheduling tools. The quality of the response depends entirely on the data the self-service platform has access to.

Unfortunately, many self-service platforms and chatbots don’t neatly integrate into a complicated healthcare technical stack. As a result, the types of requests patients can make are limited – or responses will contain inaccurate information – and that will lead to frustration or negative health outcomes.

Compliance

Healthcare is one of the most tightly regulated industries in the U.S., and self-service platforms are right in the thick of it. These platforms handle loads of sensitive data…think healthcare records, payment info, and more. That means they need to check all the regulatory boxes: HIPAA compliance, data encryption, user authentication, accessibility standards, audit requirements, and even marketing rules.

The truth? Many self-service platforms just don’t meet the bar for healthcare’s strict standards. It’s no wonder hospital legal teams are cautious.

Safety

Hallucinations, or factually incorrect statements made by AI, are a big hurdle for self-service in healthcare. In the retail industry, a hallucination may give someone the wrong recommendation based on their shoe size. However, hallucinations in healthcare could take someone’s life.

Patients assign a certain degree of trust to chatbots when it's part of a hospital portal. But bias, misinformation, or poor-quality information can lead to improper self-diagnoses, incorrect medications, or even wrong treatments. In healthcare, there’s no room for guesswork. Accuracy isn’t optional, but hospitals struggle to implement any patient self-service system where there’s a risk of harming patients due to limited oversight.

The Solution

Salesforce isn’t a single tool. It’s a suite of connected platforms that solve specific use cases with integration, compliance, and safety, like patient self-service. This use case comes to life with three key Salesforce products: Health Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Agentforce. Together, they deliver the integration, compliance, and security that patient self-service requires. Here’s the breakdown.

Health Cloud

Remember when we said that integration is a challenge? Health Cloud is the unifier. It creates unified patient profiles from EHRs, schedules, billing tools, and claims systems. That allows patients to access medical history, prescriptions, results, appointments, and more through one user interface. Data is not longer spread between multiple systems…it’s integrated in one convenient view.

Experience Cloud

Experience Cloud is the authenticated hub for everything patients need, like asking questions, scheduling appointments, accessing records, and paying bills. It integrates with Health Cloud to pull in patient data, creating a personalized experience tailored to their conditions and preferences. The result? A portal that presents relevant educational content, timely appointment reminders, and healthcare tips.

Agentforce

Agentforce can handle complicated questions without the need to navigate through menus. Additionally, oversight means that it’s safer than other chatbots. Human support agents can step in during the chat, or escalate over the phone and email. Agents can also see the unified patient profile from Health Cloud, allowing them to personalize the conversation based on health histories or any other information.

The Results