Patient Triage with Salesforce and AI

The Problem

The efficiency of an emergency room directly correlates with patient outcomes. Did you know that patients are 5.4% more likely to die when the emergency room is crowded? As a result, hospitals are looking for solutions to improve triaging. However, they first need to examine why emergency room triaging is a problem in the first place.

Let’s dive in.

Overcrowding

These days, emergency rooms are operating beyond capacity. Staff is getting smaller, and patient volumes are getting more significant. This is a perfect storm to skyrocket wait times, and longer wait times mean patients face treatment delays. We’re also seeing a rise in left without being seen (LWBS) rates, meaning that patient satisfaction – and health outcomes – are nosediving.

Inconsistent Decision Trees

In many emergency rooms, triage decisions aren’t dictated by the process but by individual nurses with their own experiences, training, and judgment. Sure, intuition is essential. But a lack of standardization can let subjectivity creep into decision-making. Add exploding patient volumes into that mix, and it’s easy to understand why clinical staff may be too overwhelmed to make the right decision every time. As a result, critical patient care may be delayed, and non-urgent care may escalate.

Integration Challenges

Hospitals are notorious for siloing data between EHRs, claims, billing, and marketing, whether due to legacy tools or non-compliant data standards. Without access to the data in these systems to create a unified patient profile, triage decisions are made with incomplete data sets.

Compliance Challenges

Hospitals sometimes hesitate to use AI-based solutions to solve clinical challenges, and for good reason. Without proper safeguards, AI can produce hallucinations that produce the wrong diagnoses, prescriptions, or health recommendations. In some cases, the FDA may regulate AI-based solutions further. Hospitals must be careful when applying AI to any process that touches patients.

The Solution

Salesforce solves the triage use case with an interoperable suite of solutions. These include Health Cloud for data unification and Einstein for AI-based decision support. In this solution, it’s essential to maintain patient safety and compliance with FDA regulations. That’s why our solutions always leave final decisions to qualified clinical staff. Salesforce acts as a support to handle the major challenges associated with triage. Let’s dive in.

Salesforce Health Cloud unifies data from across the healthcare tech stack, including EHRs, billing, claims, and marketing. Integration creates unified patient profiles with structured and unstructured data, including demographic info, symptoms, vitals, and historical data. With this in hand, the platform can recommend consistent triage decisions based on urgency, risk scores, available resources, and locations.

To keep the ER staffed, Einstein can use historical data to predict busy periods, helping hospitals staff for peak times. Data can include seasonal illness patterns, times of day, and more.

The Results