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Salesforce Health Cloud Guide

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Written by Matt Fiel on November 4, 2020

For healthcare professionals researching Salesforce, or for those inheriting the platform, doing a Salesforce Health Cloud implementation can be a bit daunting to wrap your head around. Read our starter guide to understand key terms and applications of Salesforce Health Cloud.

In this Health Cloud Guide, we'll discuss:

  • A High-Level Overview
  • Terminology You Need to Know
  • Health Cloud Capabilities and Features
  • Implementation Inspiration
Health Cloud Starter Guide

Salesforce Health Cloud is arguably the most robust CRM ever built for healthcare. It is the ideal patient management software, allowing for more personalized connections, collaboration across health teams, integration with EHRs, and more. But for those first getting started on the platform, the amount of information and pure power can be daunting. Don't fear, we've captured the highlights for you, including core capabilities and key terms, to help you hit the ground running.

Salesforce Health Cloud: The 30-Second Overview

What exactly is Health Cloud? In a nutshell, it builds and expands upon all of the core features of the Salesforce CRM with capabilities and features designed exclusively around the needs of patients, healthcare providers, and payers.

Overview diagram of Salesforce Health Cloud capabilities

It gives healthcare professionals the tools they need to collaborate efficiently. It also helps care team members understand patients better so they can provide truly personalized medicine. It even provides essential functionality for payers and insurance companies.

Now that you have the 30-second overview, let's dive into some ways Salesforce Health Cloud can help improve the patient and provider experience in your healthcare organization.

Salesforce Health Cloud Specific Terminology

  • Care Team. Think doctors, nurses, medical assistants, health navigators, even administrative professionals. The care team is made up of people who interact with the patient at some, and sometimes many, points of his or her journey. In Salesforce Health Cloud, Care Team may also be referred to as a Case Team, because they have access to the patient case.
  • Provider. Providers are a subset of the care team. These are the people or companies that perform the healthcare service, such as a doctor or the health system in which she works.
  • Payer. Payers handle financial and operational aspects of providing healthcare. Most often payers are insurers or provider networks.
  • EHR. The electronic health registry, which holds a patient's electronic health record.
  • HL7. Health Level Seven International, or HL7, is a standards-development organization. They create the HL7 Standards, which are formats and definitions developed specifically for the medical industry. They are used for sharing and developing electronic health records (EHRs).

Here's how all those terms come together in a Penrod Salesforce Health Cloud Implementation.

Diagram of the Salesforce Health Cloud care ecosystem
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Salesforce Health Cloud Core Capabilities

As we noted, Health Cloud does a lot and does it well, patient records, care providers, payer information, even surveys. But really, it boils down to four core capabilities:

  • Health Cloud brings together data from legacy systems of records and electronic health registries (EHRs). It's not a question of EHR vs CRM, it's CRM plus EHR. Health Cloud provides the right data model to bring information, including patient records, from external systems into one centralized platform. With its innovative 360-degree patient view, you can streamline processes and help enable coordinated care.
  • Health Cloud gives healthcare professionals the tools they need to collaborate more efficiently. Patients today interact with multiple people along their healthcare journey, from schedulers to nurses to doctors. Depending on their health needs and goals, they may have a primary care physician, as well as a team of specialists, such as a cardiologist or dietician.

Salesforce Health Cloud provides the entire care team one central platform where they can provide collaborative care. By having this holistic view of the patient and his or her health journey, the team can coordinate care plans seamlessly together to promote optimal outcomes.

  • Health Cloud helps care teams build 1-to-1 relationships across entire care journeys. People generally go to the doctor because they want to get well or stay well. For some people, the journey to health is a long one. That's why it's so important to establish trusted relationships with patients. Salesforce Health Cloud helps facilitate this by allowing all members of the care team to capture important notes and milestones, as well as medical information. This helps all members of the care team, from scheduler to specialist, provide truly personalized care.
  • Health Cloud provides essential functionality for payers. That's right, Salesforce Health Cloud isn't just for providers! It allows insurance companies and payers to view a patient's available coverage, in-network, and out-of-network costs. Since health insurance is so tightly affiliated with healthcare, this is a big win across the board, creating efficiencies for patients, providers, and payers.

Salesforce Health Cloud Key Feature Sets

In addition to core capabilities and key terms, having a handle on select feature sets within Salesforce Health Cloud can help you level up your patient management game. Here are some features we love:

Data Privacy, Protection, and Integration

Salesforce Shield is the trusted trio of security tools that help admins and developers build security into business-critical apps. The trio includes Shield Platform Encryption, Event Monitoring, and Field Audit Trail. With this, users and patients can know that their personal health information is secure. This information can also integrate with the patient's electronic health record, providing easy access to help them stay engaged in their care.

360-Degree Patient View

Salesforce Health Cloud offers a unique 360-degree view of the patient, which includes a patient profile, health records, timeline view, and treatment plans. This eliminates the hassle of toggling between screens and platforms and allows teams to spend more time helping patients.

Care Team Productivity

Care teams are continually tasked with doing more in less time, while still offering a high level of care. Health Cloud helps lighten this load by offering innovative applications. One example is household mappings, which allow you to manage a view of all households a patient belongs to, gaining more insight into their home life, needs, and goals.

Another is the ability to take assessments using Salesforce Surveys. This allows providers to gauge their own performance and see if they are meeting patient's expectations.

Industry Use Cases

The fastest way to figure out how to implement Health Cloud? Look at who's already gotten it right. We've built it for providers, payers, labs, pharma companies, and med device teams, and every build looks different. Same platform. Different playbook every time. Below, you'll find the use cases and success stories that show what a strong Health Cloud implementation looks like, organized by industry.

Healthcare Providers

Success Story: How a Fast-Growing Hospital Personalizes Every Interaction with Health Cloud

Payers

Success Story: Delivering Exceptional Member Support with Unified Platforms

Labs

Success Story: Streamline Infectious Disease Testing with Salesforce Health Cloud

Pharma

Success Story: Delivering Compassionate Care for Life-Saving Drug Trials

Med Dev

Penrod's Final Take

Whether you're thinking of dipping your toes into the Salesforce ecosystem or have jumped in headfirst, knowing Salesforce Health Cloud's capabilities, terminology, and feature sets will help you navigate the platform smoothly. In no time, you'll be able to manage complex patient information while also personalizing the patient experience from the very start, all within one innovative platform.

Now that you know the basics, read this to see if Salesforce Health Cloud is right for your implementation.

Salesforce Health Cloud is a CRM built specifically for healthcare and life sciences. It pulls patient, provider, and payer data into one place so care teams, sales teams, and support teams work from the same information instead of chasing it across five different systems.

Providers, payers, labs, pharma companies, and med device teams all run on Health Cloud. It's the same platform, but the setup looks different for each one. That's exactly what the use cases above show.

No. Health Cloud doesn't replace your EHR. It works alongside it, adding a layer built for relationships and engagement instead of clinical documentation. Your EHR stays the system of record for care. Health Cloud becomes the system your teams use to coordinate, communicate, and follow up.

At a high level, Health Cloud gives you a 360-degree patient or member profile, tools for care plans and care team collaboration, utilization management for payers, and built-in interoperability with EHRs through HL7 and FHIR. It also comes with the security features you need to stay HIPAA compliant, plus Salesforce's AI and analytics tools on top. It's a lot more than a place to store contact info.

It depends on the use case. With our Health Cloud Foundation product, we can get you up and running in as little as two weeks, complete with the data models, security sets, and core workflows you need to start using the platform. More complex builds, ones with heavy integrations or multiple departments involved, can take up to six months. Either way, we'll give you a realistic timeline before we start, not after.

Salesforce publishes its own developer documentation, which covers the technical object model in detail. You can find it here. It's a great technical reference. Just don't expect it to tell you which use cases matter most for your organization. That's what we're here for.

Yes. Every industry section above links to a success story from a real Health Cloud build we've done. Skip straight to the one that matches your industry if you want to see it in action.
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About The Author

With over 15 years of experience in marketing strategy, web development, and creative design, I lead the marketing team at Penrod, a boutique Salesforce partner focused on the healthcare and life sciences industry. As a Salesforce Certified Consultant, I have deep knowledge and skills in leveraging the platform to optimize marketing automation, lead generation, and customer engagement.


Matt Fiel
EVP of Marketing

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