Salesforce this past week announced the launch of new innovations as part of its customer relationship management product that works with existing electronic health records. 

WHY IT MATTERS

The Patient 360 for Health CRM innovations are designed for cost efficiency and productivity, according to Salesforce. The company boasts of several of its features:

• Behavioral Health, which it says gives clinicians and case managers tools like interactive health timelines populated with patient health milestones and behavioral events, crisis support with preconfigured workflows for patient intake, assessments and automated reporting.
• Advanced Therapy Management to provide pharmaceutical companies with visibility into the use of patient therapies from referrals and appointment scheduling to drug manufacturing. 
• Salesforce Genie for Healthcare, which integrates clinical and nonclinical data, like current medications and social determinants of health, to create holistic patient profiles.
• Patient Care Coordination with Slack, a team communications tool, to coordinate case management and help users ask questions about patient care in a secure environment. 
• MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare, which exchanges data under HL7 v2 and FHIR R4 standards to unify data from EHRs, labs, billing and scheduling.
• Automation for Utilization Management to process information exchange between payers and providers and show it on dashboards.
• Digital marketplaces, which are available to pharmaceutical and medical device companies in the ecosystem to sell products and offer subscriptions. 

While Patient 360 for Health innovations are new, Advanced Recovery Systems, bluebird bio and John Muir Health have already used the new healthcare capabilities built for the 360 platform on Salesforce's health cloud.

"One of the biggest challenges health systems face today is providing a unified, complete picture of the patient to the doctors, hospitals and care facilities that serve them," said David Hook, executive director of marketing and digital consumer experience at John Muir Health, in the announcement.

"With Salesforce Genie for Health and other technology from across Salesforce’s Patient 360, we’re able to put the patient at the center of everything we do and provide the trusted support they expect," he said.

The Salesforce health cloud, which is for providers, medical device and tech companies, payers and specialty pharmacy organizations, and public health, aims to provide secure access for healthcare-organization CRM tools to analyze patient data for personalized communications. It also offers recruitment, reporting and other tools. 

More recently, Salesforce added "care from anywhere" tools like remote patient monitoring, medication management and other patient-facing mobile applications.

THE LARGER TREND

According to Salesforce, administrative spending is about one-quarter of the total cost of the nearly $4 trillion spent on healthcare annually in the United States. Labor shortages are also adding expense.

However, workforce challenges go beyond the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinicians have cited EHR dissatisfaction, technology challenges and high documentation demands as strains contributing to burnout and resignations.

Going back to the outset of the pandemic, a report on key workforce trends by the American Hospital Association highlighted how technology could address professional staffing shortages.

"Although there are challenges, there also are opportunities to improve care, motivate and re-skill staff and modernize processes and business models that reflect the shift toward providing the right care, at the right time, in the right setting," the AHA wrote in its report.

ON THE RECORD

"Today’s organizations must invest in streamlined solutions that increase time-to-value, cost savings and efficiency without compromising patient outcomes," said Lashonda Anderson-Williams, CRO for healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce, in a statement. "Patient 360 for Health innovations [gives] customers cost-saving automation, personalized intelligence, and real-time data tools to help deliver patient success now – even in the face of increasing costs and labor shortages," she said.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.