Looking to further its foothold in the healthcare space, this morning at HIMSS 2019 Salesforce unveiled three new capabilities of its Health Cloud system. The new capabilities will be focused on social determinants of health, in-home care, and personalizing the patient journey.
The social determinants of health feature will allow providers to capture information about a patient's living situation, including transportation options, housing status and care network. According to the company, payers can use this data to deliver personalized or preventative medicine.
“I was trained as a family doctor and the joke was you couldn’t take care of someone unless you knew their pets name. And like all jokes there is a little bit of truth in there, which is we know now that the determinants of whether someone is going to have a good or bad outcome or the cost of what it is going to be to take care of someone is largely determined not only by … what procedures or medications or studies they get, but who they are and how are they feeling — whether they can eat or have transportation or rent due,” Salesforce Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joshua Newman, told MobiHealthNews. “Because of our platform, we can enable the kinds of analysis that can point to a recommendation or a recommended action or a risk, and even more crucially we can start to fill the gaps and start to address these issues.”
The second feature focuses on mobile-first in-home care collaboration. The system was designed to help care providers extend care into a patient's home and break down care silos. This feature will include an element called Field Service Lightning for Health Cloud, which has the ability to connect home care organizations with the patient's other providers.
“It is less expensive to take care of people at home and people want to be at home, desperately. [But] the place…with the greatest variation is the home. Hospitals generally work pretty well and there is a lot of similarity between them,” Newman said. “When people leave those settings it is the Wild West. For those folks who have all the resources, it's great, but the majority of the population doesn’t have that. So to be able to give people care in their home is going to be a great advantage. I think it is only going to grow."
Lastly, the Personalized Patient Journeys feature integrates Health Cloud and salesforce Marketing Cloud so that providers are able to personalize different campaigns to each patient. The feature can monitor clinical and nonclinical engagement. It can build lists and then send targeted emails.
“None of the patients or providers I talk to are complaining about drugs or the surgery. … On the other hand every person I talk to in our company, people that have great resources and education, all the way down to people who don’t have very much of it, everyone complains about access. They don’t feel known or understood or cared for and it is a big deal… Salesforce is in the business of enabling connections and these relationship and with these three new features to Health Cloud we have the ability to provide a greater connection between the provider and their patients, which is really what we need now.”
