Salesforce CRM, Data, and AI Innovations Put Patient Relationships at the Heart of Healthcare Operations

Customer 360 for Health innovations – including new Data Cloud, AI, and automation capabilities – help personalize care experiences in real time and improve time to value, enabling stronger patient relationships

Salesforce announced new Customer 360 for Health capabilities that help healthcare providers deliver more personalized patient experiences and reduce operational costs.

Significance: Healthcare providers need cutting edge technologies, including real-time data, AI, and automation, to deliver the seamless, personalized experiences patients need. However, many healthcare organizations aren’t keeping up with the expectations of their customers.

In a recent survey of healthcare consumers, nearly 80% cited difficulty navigating the care journey — both online and with customer support — as the top reason for leaving their provider. Healthcare organizations are aware of these issues, and cite driving efficiencies and reducing operational costs (79%) as top priorities over the next two years.

Innovation in action: Customer 360 for Health helps healthcare and life sciences organizations enhance the overall care experience with the full power of Salesforce technology, including real-time data from Data Cloud, Einstein AI, and automation with Flow. This includes automating manual processes like prior authorizations, intake, and patient scheduling.

Features announced today create efficiencies and reduce costs for business functions across healthcare operations:

• Home Health helps automate the intake and scheduling process for in-home treatment using scheduling workflows to convert prior authorizations into scheduled visits based on patient preferences. Now, home health schedulers can manage appointments and care professional assignments on one platform while visiting health professionals can easily access patients’ data, including preferences and medication information, to help monitor care plans from the road on their personal device.

• Data Cloud for Healthcare enables healthcare and life sciences organizations to connect and activate clinical and non-clinical patient data from multiple sources, including electronic health records (EHR), social and behavioral data, assessments, and more, into a real-time patient profile. These unified health insights can help organizations identify potential risks, determine therapeutic approaches, and educate patients with personalized communication and real-time patient engagement. Further, with Einstein Predictions layered in, care teams can leverage data insights from similar groups to better understand a patient’s health insights.

• Patient Contact Center is a pre-configured agent console that provides a comprehensive view of the patient using MuleSoft Direct for Health Cloud to access EHR data. This helps healthcare organizations optimize patient interactions in real time, including scheduling appointments, billing, and updating insurance information. Features like Action Launcher let agents automate workflows to serve patients faster, while Einstein Article Recommendations provides call center agents with AI-surfaced knowledge article recommendations based on common topics patients most frequently need help with — like insurance coverage and existing claims. Further, with a HIPAA-compliant voice channel, agents can manage calls with patients while keeping their information private and secure.

• MuleSoft Direct for Health Cloud provides out-of-the-box, FHIR-aligned connectors to access EHR data. Now, a hospital’s non-clinical team can leverage this data to submit prior authorization requests to help patients get approval for procedures covered by their insurance more quickly.

• Tableau Accelerators for Health Cloud are ready-to-use, intelligent dashboards for a variety of use cases, including referral analytics, risk analytics, and insights to reduce “no shows.” Teams can customize Tableau Accelerators and combine them with their data to fit their needs while getting data-driven insights faster.

Soundbite: “The future of healthcare requires trusted, compliant technologies to help deliver greater levels of personalization and automation. Customer 360 for Health, Data Cloud, and Einstein AI use the full power of Salesforce to deliver faster time to value, helping any healthcare organization build more trusted patient relationships at a lower operational cost.” – Amit Khanna, SVP & GM, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Salesforce

Customer highlights:

• Barwon Health is one of Australia’s largest regional health services, providing care to people at all stages of life. “With Customer 360 for Health, our clinicians have the tools they need to enroll patients in programs when they need it most and give providers real-time visibility into their care so every team member is better coordinated. With Salesforce, there is a greater level of acuity across our hospital-in-home services, allowing more patients to recover in the comfort of their own home, faster.” – Dr. Alastair MacKinlay, Medical Informatics Lead, Barwon Health

• Bon Secours Mercy Health is focused on providing the highest quality care and patient experience for our communities across seven U.S. states and two countries. “We seek to put patients at the heart of everything we do, whether they use our digital front door, engage with our contact center, are touched by our digital patient outreach efforts, or see us virtually. Before Salesforce, we didn’t have a way to create a full and total 360-degree view of our patients and consumers, but now we’re able to personalize every aspect of their journey, including the way we engage with them digitally to streamline access and personalize interactions.” – Morgan Griffith, Chief Product Officer, Bon Secours Mercy Health

• The Veterans Health Administration is the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States and healthcare arm of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), managing over 1,200 healthcare facilities and a number of programs like SQUARES, CARMA, and VA Health Connect. With over 150 Salesforce applications, the Veterans Health Administration delivers integrated care services to veterans and their families from anywhere.