How Salesforce Can Help Personalize Patient Journeys

Salesforce Health Cloud has truly transformative potential for healthcare organizations (including doctors’ offices, insurance providers, hospital groups, and others) interested in personalizing patient journeys.

That’s increasingly important in today’s healthcare ecosystem, where the success of healthcare is outcome-driven: quality of care matters much more than quantity of interventions. And quality depends heavily on each patient’s individual circumstances and needs.

In this piece, I’ll explain how Salesforce Health Cloud makes personalization possible at scale and offer examples of how personalized journeys can significantly improve not just patient satisfaction but also overall health outcomes.

How it Works: Unified Data, Unified Care

Personalized patient journeys at scale require healthcare organizations to have three things:

1. A unified view of patient data
2. Access to that unified view across all members of a patient’s care team
3. Insights and automation powered by the system

Let’s take a look at what these are and how they work together.

Unified 360° View of Patient Data

Salesforce calls this “Patient 360”. Today, healthcare offices use electronic health records (EHR) to store patient information digitally. But this information is often siloed within individual practitioners’ systems.

The outcome is that practitioners lack crucial insight into their patients and patients have frustrating, fragmented experiences from one provider to the next – for example, after being referred to a specialist by a primary care physician, the patient might have to fill out their entire health history, even though this information is already on file.

Access across a Care Team

Salesforce Health Cloud helps prevent that kind of frustration by ensuring that everyone involved with a patient’s care has access to the information and insights they need to have timely, preventative, and positive impacts for the patient they are caring for, all in a single system of engagement.

This care team or care community might include doctors, specialists, scheduling assistants, administrators, family members involved in care, and others (see Figure 1). I’ll illustrate how this manifests when I get to the examples.

Figure 1: A care community

Insights and Automation

Having a patient’s data in a single place makes it possible to derive insights that would otherwise be hidden. But in the real world, healthcare professionals don’t have time to dig through patients’ data to gather those insights.

The Salesforce Health Cloud, together with Salesforce’s integrated AI and Analytics capability (Tableau CRM) can pull these automatically and recommend them to the care team as needed. It also allows for automated communications with patients when insights suggest that such communications would be valuable. Again, I’ll offer illustrations in the next section.

Read more: Is Your Business Ready for Hyper Automation?

Personalized Patient Journey Examples

Together, the three elements outlined above enable healthcare providers to personalize every part of the patient journey, including appointments, appointment reminders, referrals, post-acute care, and more.

Now let’s look at some examples of personalized patient journeys in action.

Personalized Patient Journey Example 1: Facilitating Care Management

Imagine a patient who has Type 2 diabetes. Their doctor has laid out a care plan that includes doing cardio for 10 minutes per day, tracking diet, tracking blood pressure, and going in for blood work every 15 days.

With Salesforce Health Cloud, their care coordinator can see at a glance whether they’re adhering to that plan. If they don’t come in for their blood work for a month, for example, the system might pop up an automated message to alert the care coordinator.

The care coordinator can then reach out to ask why. Maybe the patient says they can’t get to public transportation and they don’t have a car. The care coordinator can solve this by, for example, scheduling the patient an Uber to ensure they arrive for their next appointment.

Thanks to the 360° visibility of the patient data, accessibility, and data-driven insights, the care team is able to ensure that the patient complies with important care guidelines and therefore improves their overall health outcomes.

Or maybe the patient doesn’t have an Uber account. If a family member with caregiving responsibilities does, the care coordinator can use their account to schedule the ride, or assign a task to the family member to take the patient in for blood work.

Personalized Patient Journey Example 2: Enabling Preventive Care, Improving Quality of Care

Now let’s imagine a patient who has a family history of diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiac issues. The patient is in their early 40s and has a high BMI.

Based on that information, and driven by recommendations generated by Tableau CRM, Salesforce Health Cloud can automatically enroll that patient into a preventative care plan, which might include…

• Regular physical workout targets.
• Lifestyle changes.
• Periodic diagnostic checks.

This proactive care approach helps prevent the patient from developing diabetes, reduces the overall cost of treatment (both out of pocket and via insurance claims), and enables a longer and healthier life.

This kind of preventive care is enhanced when patients use IoT-connected healthcare devices. For example, a connected bracelet or watch that reminds them to move throughout the day could increase the likelihood that they meet their activity targets.

Personalized Patient Journey Example 3: Optimizing Health Outcomes

When a primary care physician refers a patient to a specialist, it’s generally up to the patient to follow up on that referral – which may be crucial to their long-term health.

If a patient doesn’t follow through, Salesforce Health Cloud makes it possible to shift the administrative work to their care team.

The system could notify the care coordinator, for example, that a patient hasn’t yet scheduled an appointment with a specialist. The care coordinator could then use the “Provider Search” feature of Health Cloud, look up specialists on a patient’s insurance plan within a geographical region, choose the closest one, and use their scheduling information to schedule the patient an appointment.

This takes the difficult logistical work off the patient’s plate and helps ensure they get the care they need to achieve optimal health.

When Providers Can Personalize Care at Scale, the Outcome Is Quality

These examples barely scrape the surface of what’s possible with Salesforce Health Cloud.

At scale, health insurance providers can use aggregated data to create coverage plans that better match the ways people actually use their coverage. Hospital groups can identify and track outbreaks of disease and alert people in an affected area, recommending safety precautions. At a population level, we can shift in a meaningful way toward preventive care to lower system-wide costs while improving health outcomes.It all starts with determining how Salesforce Health Cloud can help your organization – and we’d love to help you do that. Get in touch with us today to set up a conversation!