Needs are changing in the Healthcare and life sciences industries, as are expectations. Today’s focus is on improving health outcomes and efficiency. The collaboration and innovation sought by enterprise health and life sciences organizations require a robust and fully integrated CRM to meet today’s challenges.
The best CRM for any industry seamlessly connects systems and data to provide 360 views, market agility, and build long-term relationships. For health and life sciences, the “best in class” CRM is Health Cloud, a Salesforce component that makes possible personalized treatments, better health outcomes, and increased trust.
Salesforce reimagines its CRM for the health and life sciences industry
“Salesforce built Health Cloud so that organizations can grow, scale, and customize it to their businesses,” explains Dawna Botts, Salesforce solution architect and business analyst at Ciberspring. Health Cloud is a secure, customizable platform that supports agility to market and efficiency, all within regulatory and compliance guidelines.
With Health Cloud, healthcare becomes tailored to the individual patient, resulting in customized care plans that take into account every facet of care: from acquisition, therapy, and treatment to insurance coverage and a ride home.
Health Cloud empowers providers with a comprehensive CRM solution, which gives them the ability to improve efficiency, patient care levels, and patient experience. Providers have access to the entire patient history, social determinant data, and insurance details both before and during the visit or procedure.
Patients feel that you care for them as individuals when the details of their specific situation are known without them saying anything. This extends to their caregivers and community. With a patient-centric approach, medication and appointment details won’t have to be managed by the caregiver, and important health information doesn’t slip through the cracks.
Health Cloud CRM works within health and life sciences by:
- Connecting patient data and experience from acquisition to preventative care.
- Reducing the chance of making inputting errors with automated forms and a system that connects all the data.
- Providing a lifetime of health history, medications, insurance info, contact info, plus social determinant data, all on one screen.
- Allowing for grouping of patients by health issue, disease, medication type, age, or however else you want.
- Evaluating how groups are responding to treatments, and helping clinicians gain insight that could lead to better preventative care or better patient compliance.
Impact of Health Cloud on the healthcare industry
Health Cloud is at the center of the healthcare industry’s shift in focus to providing better outcomes at every point of care.
“Salesforce did its research on the Health and Life Sciences industry during the creation of Health Cloud, and it shows,” says Botts. “Any part of the care process that involves patient experience, the patient journey, or putting the patient first, can be made better with Health Cloud.”
Health Cloud provides the collaborative environment and 360 patient views on which physicians, nurses, and other front-line caregivers now rely. For payers, it helps build long-term relationships and loyalty. Health Cloud allows for caring for patients in the exact way they need for their maximum benefit, from appointment time to insurance coverage. It even allows for input of data from patient’s medical device wearables for deeper insight into treatment effectiveness.
The healthcare industry also has benefited from the fast deployment and self-service options Health Cloud provides. Solutions can be configured in months, not years.
A few of the many benefits Health Cloud brings to its industry:
- Secure, automated communication to and about patients.
- Secure confidential EHR for facilities without access to the system.
- Self-service options for scheduling appointments, reminders, and payments.
- Secure onboarding and acquisition of patients
- Personalized insights into patient care improvements and therapies
What healthcare looks like without Health Cloud
Almost anyone who has been the caregiver to a loved one during a health challenge has felt the pain of a disconnected health care system. Hours spent on the phone collecting disparate information from each medical professional, hospital, and insurance representative, none of them having the full picture or understanding the loved one’s situation. Important medical and social determinant data can fall through those cracks easily, resulting in sub-par health outcomes.
On the life sciences side, a world without Health Cloud is one fraught with worry over compliance issues and patient acquisition.
What Health Cloud solves or mitigates are issues that have plagued the health care industry in the past:
- Compliance: Health Cloud is built not just HIPAA-compliant but HITRUST-compliant.
- Patient experience: Details don’t fall through the cracks with Health Cloud. All care team members are on same page.
- Communication among providers, payers, and patient: Health Cloud provides full EHR integration. In the past EMRs had been siloed and physicians couldn’t see the patient history. Now the patient record is there in full.
How providers use Health Cloud as a CRM to manage patient relationships
Here is where Health Cloud makes its most obvious difference: it helps all providers – physicians, skilled nursing, care coordinators, rehab centers – Improve patient experiences and health outcomes. When properly implemented, Health Cloud gives care providers the ability to make patients “feel like family.”
That is what patients expect: not just personalized but individualized experiences across the spectrum of care, available to them on demand wherever possible. This could be an app that lets them book an appointment or get test results, or an email that delivers preventative care information about their specific health issues.
On the provider end, this means a fully integrated data flow between systems, offices, and other care providers so that information about the patient gets to the right people at the right time. This 360 view of EHRs, social determinants, and communication preferences empowers providers to give their patients positive experiences that cater to their personal needs.
Providers, too, benefit from Health Cloud’s ability to provide timely, accurate information. “Communication, communication, communication,” says Botts. “Having historical data on the patient, and having your team see everything they need to see (and not see the things they don’t need to see) is the primary reason providers need Health Cloud.”
It’s not just physicians that benefit from Health Cloud’s patient relationship management tools. Botts has seen Health Cloud care management benefit skilled nursing facilities and patient care managers. “They get to see every department’s actions and efforts for one patient on one screen,” says Botts.
Managing physician referrals with Salesforce Health Cloud
The physician referral management or provider relationship management (PRM) component of Health Cloud is one of its best-kept secrets. Many Health Cloud users don’t realize it offers a robust PRM tool (yet another reason to engage a Salesforce partner for your Health Cloud implementation).
“The new Provider Relationship Management capabilities in Health Cloud are designed to help healthcare organizations connect consumers to the right care faster, efficiently manage provider networks and grow quality relationships,” says Dr. Ashwini Zenooz, Chief Medical Officer and general manager for healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce.
A PRM helps providers manage their networks of practitioners and facilities, and stores data on their relationships with and the specialties of other physicians, including:
- Education, license, board certification and specialty
- Affiliated healthcare organizations, hospitals, and insurance payer and plan networks
- Services provided and procedures performed at facilities
- Operating hours, practice locations, parking and public transportation information
A well-defined, data rich PRM allows physicians to track the quality of care received by their patients, and to retain the downstream revenue generated from referrals within their network. It also provides a means of strengthening relationships with other physicians.
One particularly useful features of Health Cloud’s PRM is its provider search, allowing payers and providers to connect individual patients to the best care possible. This ability to foster personalized experiences for patients is a critical component of PRM.
Health Cloud’s crucial role in the life sciences
Health Cloud meets several critical patient management needs for life science enterprises.
First, it helps find and acquire new patients for clinical trials and rare drugs. Health Cloud connects data, process, and people and does it within compliance guidelines. It also provides omni-channel support to meet people where they are: email, text, websites, or chat. It streamlines and simplifies patient engagement.
Second, it provides healthcare reimbursement and deductible information for patients. Says Botts, “Health Cloud assists in the utilization of health insurance and prescriptions, and where they are with meeting their deductibles, to provide the best patient experience.”
Ciberspring recently used Health Cloud’s Service Console to build a system for managing a rare disease call center. Through telephony integration, workflows, and automation, a seamless caller experience was achieved, and within six weeks.
Health Cloud’s biggest asset is its ability to streamline processes and reduce complexity. It helps maximize the impact of everything from new patient enrollment to scaling therapy-specific services.
Managing provider relationships in the life sciences with Health Cloud
Health Cloud CRM solves the same problems for life sciences that another CRM might solve for any other industry. It gives complete, accurate, and historical data on patients, which in turns drive innovation, increases efficiency, and, paramount to health and life sciences organizations, provides a connected and personalized experience for patients.
Health Cloud connects the supply chain, manufacturing, marketing, sales, regulatory teams, and patient care services to create an efficient drug development pipeline.
For patients it identifies accepted insurances, notes deductibles, finds facilities within network, and provides preventative care communications.
For providers, Health Cloud offers a robust PRM that facilitates a higher level of patient care and a means of tracking referrals and down-stream revenue within networks.
Health Cloud isn’t just for big pharma
For companies and services outside the health and life sciences vertical, Health Cloud is just as effective for streamlining processes, improving connection and communication, and providing secure data.
Botts has seen Health Cloud make a huge difference for hybrid companies that don’t fit in the typical health and life sciences verticals. “For hybrids like medical transport companies, I’ve seen Health Cloud give them the ability to run their process, stay HITRUST- and HIPAA-compliant, communicate with subcontractors, and allow patients and their guardians to see their own data after going through security,” she says.
Many of these hybrid companies don’t fit into the payer box but they still have to capture the CPT or HCPS codes and the ICD codes. The hybrid companies are just as focused on patient experience as typical health and life science organizations, and Health Cloud gives them the tools to provide the best possible health outcome for patients.
Social determinants and Health Cloud
According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, social determinants of health are “conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.”
“Social determinants are becoming a big part of healthcare,” says Botts. “There’s a big push to understand what barriers are occurring in people’s lives to getting preventative care or to not taking care of an issue in a timely manner to the point where it can’t be reversed.” A social determinant for an elderly patient, for example, could be transportation.
The federal government is giving out grants for companies to do pilots and report on social determinants and the effects they have on patients’ ability to receive health care, preventative care in particular.
Health Cloud is at the forefront of this new approach. It captures the data that helps determine what barriers a patient has to receiving timely care, what types of intervention would work for them, and even how they get to appointments.
Getting the most out of Health Cloud
Health Cloud provides the backend foundation and components needed to build a patient-centric and collaborative environment for payers, providers, and care management organizations alike. Health Cloud is not just for big healthcare facilities; the entire health industry can benefit from it.
The key to getting the most from your Health Cloud investment is a professional custom implementation. Says Botts, “Sales Force designs its products to work in a certain way. If you pay all that money for a great system like Health Cloud, and start tinkering with it, not knowing what the outcome’s going to be down the road, it’s going to hurt you. It’s going to cost the company a whole lot more, and you’re not going to get the product that you bought.”
Forward-thinking health and life sciences organizations will partner with a consulting firm that understands how to build on the backend foundation of not just Health Cloud but other Salesforce components as well, and how they all work together. Fully integrated, custom installations are where the true power of Health Cloud resides.
Ciberspring: Your experienced Salesforce partner
At Ciberspring we have deep experience with the long-term strategy, UX design, data integration, and comprehensive implementation of successful and agile health and life sciences CRM solutions using Health Cloud and other Salesforce components. A few of our success stories:
Custom mobile app delivers customer 360 for sales leaders on the go. The app, built in Salesforce Communities, gave Leadership access to information on the go and in real-time. This made the two-week delay in KOL data an issue of the past. Read more.
Rapid app development quickly connects pharma company with physicians. A fully custom solution using Community Cloud, the app gave physician engagement liaisons an easy way to record notes and information about field engagements as well as fully prepare for doctor meetings while away from their computers. Read more.
Optimizing referral management for 60-location dermatology practice. With the Salesforce upgrade to Lightning, physician liaisons could easily capture details and build relationships with their top referring providers and actively manage referrals. Read more.
Get closer to the people behind the patient
Salesforce created Health Cloud as a tool to transform the healthcare industry. Healthcare organizations from enterprise to local physician networks are leveraging its power to provide personalized care and accurate 360 views of individual patients. Life sciences organizations can bring life-saving drugs to market faster, and reach the providers and patients who need it, using the power of Health Cloud and other professionally integrated Salesforce components.
Want to know more about Health Cloud? Or already have it but wonder if you could be getting more out of your CRM investment? Reach out to our Salesforce experts. We know Salesforce and Health Cloud, and we know the Health and Life Sciences industry. Let’s talk about a technology solution that helps you create a patient-centric and connected experience across your organization and the people who rely on it. Contact us today to start a conversation.
