Salesforce is taking its biggest stab yet at conquering healthcare.
The $5 billion cloud computing behemoth on Wednesday unveiled Salesforce Health Cloud. Salesforce, best known for its customer relationship management platform, considers Health Cloud a patient relationship management product.
Its moon-shot goal is to leapfrog electronic medical records as the central patient record. It promises to cull data from as many sources as possible, safely manage that information, let patients easily access these records and display the information in a dashboard to help healthcare providers and payers better manage – and in some cases, predict – care.
Health Cloud is about “patient relationships, not records,” said Dr. Joshua Newman, chief medical officer and general manager of Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences.
“We want to prevent cancer, not treat it,” he added. Timely screening can help head off colon cancer before it develops, for example.
Salesforce already has a healthcare marketing strategy. In fact, Salesforce bandied about the idea of a “cloud-based healthcare platform” the middle of last year when it unveiled, with similar PR fanfare, a cloud-based service with Philips that let software developers, medical device-makers, payers and providers connect to the Salesforce cloud.
But this product, which also includes Philips as a partner, is much more ambitious than that one. This Health Cloud is driven specifically by major shifts in healthcare.
Salesforce seeks to capitalize on the migration to accountable care and greater focus on population health. The combination of greater prevalence of outcomes-based reimbursement and growing consumer demand to manage their health – particularly from tech-savvy millennials – drove the decision to go all-in when it comes to healthcare.
To Salesforce, EMRs are not getting the complete job done.
EMRs traditionally have been built to capture charges so hospitals and physician practices can bill insurance companies quickly and accurately. Vendors “invested to follow the money,” Newman said, not necessarily to manage patient care.
Salesforce Health Cloud shows a dashboard with a newsfeed-style list of information. Click on a patient’s name and see a health timeline with what Newman called “engagement data” such as care management. Care plans are at the bottom of each patient’s “card,” and users also can see a list of everyone approved for patient care: from spouses to doctors.
Anyone on a patient’s care team can send messages that contain protected health information because the system is built to HIPAA standards. An available Salesforce Health Cloud mobile app has “@” tagging à la Twitter or Facebook.
“Nobody has ‘@’ mentioning in healthcare,” Newman said.
Many of these features are not included in EMRs.
“Anything that docs don’t get reimbursed for might not be in the EMR,” Newman noted. This makes care coordination and accountable care difficult, he said.
The target market for Health Cloud includes care coordinators, discharge planners, healthcare administrators and nurses, and the eventual goal is precision medicine.
While Salesforce announced the product Wednesday, it is only available for preview until a planned general release in February.
Centura Health is a launch partner for Health Cloud because Jim Rogers, director of the CenturaConnect population health hub at Centura, has been using Salesforce Service Cloud for nearly 11 years, starting when he was at Texas Health Resources in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Customer relationship management software “helps when you view patients as customers,” Rogers said. Centura can match up patients with physicians with have similar interests, for example, a surgeon who skis, so patients and doctors can bond.
“It’s a bit of an eHarmony for patients as consumers.”
