Health Cloud + EHRs : Best of Both Worlds

“Why do I need Salesforce when I already have Epic?”

This is a question that is commonly asked whenever I am working with clients who are considering making an investment in Salesforce’s Health Cloud. The answer lies in leveraging the strengths of each respective system. Electronic medical record systems were designed to manage the continuum of care for its patients with the system’s primary function being to assist practitioners in documenting a patient’s journey while receiving care. This is the main reason health systems are making the decision to invest in Salesforce- and because they understand the need to manage a patient outside of a medical chart. Just like any enterprise business, health systems are focused on identifying and establishing relationships with new patients. This is where Salesforce excels in the ecosystem.

For health systems that have made the leap to Salesforce, I have seen the primary driver being focused on engaging candidate patients with Marketing Cloud and Salesforce’s new acquisition, DMP. By using Marketing Cloud and DMP, health systems are able to target new audiences via tools such as Ad Studio and Email Studio. Once these campaigns are implemented, health systems will have the ability to market to new segments and report on campaign attribution.

But where are they going to report or manage these potential new patients? This is precisely why health systems are choosing to adopt Health Cloud. While EMRs are not designed to manage candidate patients, Salesforce’s primary capability is to assist organizations in exactly that: lead management. By generating candidate patient data directly into Health Cloud, health systems are empowered to convert these potential patients using one of their most important team members- call center agents. With Marketing Cloud focused on engaging these candidate patients, Health Cloud allows a call center agent to take advantage of primary Service Cloud features such as CTI screen pop, omnichannel routing, knowledge management, and the Service Cloud console. These features that help optimize a call center agent’s experience are not available within an EMR (or are often very pricey to integrate with the EMR, more so than a commonplace CRM such as Salesforce).

Using these features, call center agents can quickly get a grasp of a candidate patient or existing patient’s interactions with their organization and identify the 360-degree view of the patient, which includes a combination of marketing activities, EHR activities, and retail activities. Using this information from multiple systems through Open APIs and the respective source systems, call center agents are leveraging Salesforce CRM capabilities to help customers with tasks such as scheduling an appointment or getting more information on a service offering.

While health systems could bypass Salesforce’s Health Cloud and utilize data extensions and SFTPs to enable Marketing Cloud, they are ultimately choosing to integrate Health Cloud with the EMR to double-down on CRM capabilities and enhance the patient’s experience. Beginning with call center capabilities, health systems can easily extend the platform to other business functions such as provider management and referral management.
Overall, the bridge to success is being built via established Salesforce CRM capabilities and Open APIs. It will be exciting to see how Health Cloud continues to evolve in the healthcare ecosystem to enable future state capabilities such as community portals for collaboration and retail upsell opportunities for patient experience drivers.

credit: Amit Sharma, Slalom Salesforce Architect, for collaboration in drafting this article.