Relationship-Driven Healthcare Powered by Salesforce

When you think of Salesforce, you likely think of a robust CRM solution used by sales and marketing teams to manage customer interactions, pipeline and data efficiently. And if that’s where your head goes, you’re right! But in recent years, Salesforce has expanded its capabilities to include AI and big data and has built a comprehensive ecosystem that supports business functions beyond sales and marketing, like operations and finance, but also offers platforms specific to industries with unique business or regulatory needs, such as healthcare and life sciences.

Launched less than a decade ago on the heels of patient-centric initiatives like the Affordable Care Act, Salesforce Health Cloud is one such industry-specific platform. Combining Salesforce’s powerful CRM with advanced features tailored for healthcare providers, payers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies and more, Salesforce Health Cloud exists on the premise of being a system of engagement rather than a system of record. It stormed onto the market in 2016 with the promise to empower “healthcare providers to go beyond health records and build stronger relationships with patients.” The early days of Salesforce Health Cloud touted a single-pane view of the patient, from current conditions and medications to scheduled appointments and lab results and enabled providers to offer patients the self-service, tech-savvy experience they had grown to expect.

In the years since, Health Cloud has evolved to meet the changing healthcare industry landscape. Today, Health Cloud is a powerful, AI-packed platform that offers a complete, unified view of the patient; integrations via MuleSoft with providers’ EHR, billing and other third-party systems; inherent security to meet stringent HIPAA regulations; and Patient 360 for Health, an aggregated wealth of AI-powered innovations such as Salesforce Genie for Healthcare which promises to integrate real-time clinical data, such as past and current medications, and non-clinical data, such as social determinants of health, to create a more comprehensive patient profile. Healthcare organizations that utilize Salesforce Health Cloud are at the forefront of the patient-centric movement and demonstrating their commitment to providing relationship-driven, not records-driven, interactions with their patients. So while Salesforce and Health Cloud make positive waves of change at an industry level, my team at TruSummit Solutions is seeing closer to home the impact the Salesforce ecosystem and its core product offerings can have on healthcare and life sciences organizations.

One Pittsburgh-based client, a national patient services provider whose technologies help pharmaceutical manufacturers, healthcare providers and patients by facilitating access to needed medications, is powered by a suite of Salesforce products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Experience Cloud. Prior to implementing Salesforce, our client was experiencing significant pain around onboarding new customers. And, with patient and provider information housed in decentralized databases and transaction applications, managing prescriber requests was a manual and laborious process, resulting in operational inefficiencies across the board, including less-than-optimal wait times for patients, increased inbound inquiries into our client’s call center, and high time-to-close rates for customer service cases. The client knew that with the right strategic roadmap, internal adoption and forward-looking governance, they could get more from Salesforce and mitigate their pain points.

The strategic roadmap we collaboratively developed with our client included a recommendation for application consolidation with a focus on centralizing data and prioritizing the use of Salesforce Service Cloud. We also worked with our client to start an in-house Salesforce Center of Excellence through which they could ensure governance to newly defined business processes and integration workflows.

Following the deployment of its new Salesforce Service Cloud instance, our client experienced near immediate relief of its onboarding and customer service pain points. The implementation enabled both sales and customer service teams to have a single-pane, holistic view of the patient’s journey, while newly redefined, automated processes reduced the need for manual manpower and increased customer service capacity. We saw agent capacity increase by 32%, redundant call volume decrease by 25%, and cases requiring manual agent intervention decrease by 50%. All of this ensured our client could enable patients’ access to much-needed therapies faster and with less error and helped our client better meet the SLAs mandated by the pharmaceutical manufacturers.

As a Salesforce partner, we believe the power of Salesforce – from industry-specific technologies like Health Cloud to core products like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud – is indisputable, and it is our mission to help Salesforce customers maximize and scale their Salesforce investment.

Reach out to Jordan at jordan.joltes@trusummitsolutions.com or visit trusummitsolutions.com