Salesforce is rolling out new cloud services for healthcare providers.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

February 20, 2017

3 Min Read
Salesforce Says Turn Your Head & Cough

Salesforce has added new capabilities to its Health Cloud service, designed to help healthcare professionals improve patient recruitment, focus on patients with highest risk factors, and segment patient populations for targeted communications.

Salesforce sees healthcare as a natural extension of its sales automation roots, Dr. Joshua Newman, Salesforce chief medical officer, tells Light Reading. "Doctors should be reaching out and keeping the relationship engaged," he says. "Healthcare needs to connect with patients in customer-like ways." These connections provide business and financial benefits to the healthcare provider, and also improve outcomes, according to Salesforce.

The Lead-to-Patient Conversion service does what the name says -- allows healthcare providers to convert leads to new patients. Leads can be imported from Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or through integration with Electronic Health Records (EHR), a data warehouse, a patient registration system or a call center, Salesforce says.

Risk Stratification uses Salesforce Analytics Cloud to help care coordinators identify and focus on patients with the highest risk factors. The service automatically calculates risk scores for each patient based on the industry standard Center for Medicaid Services Hierarchical Condition Category model. Providers can use the information to target preventative care to patients who need it most, Salesforce says.

Advanced Segmentation allows care teams to filter patient populations to create targeted approaches for outreach. "If you want to find all women between ages 50-60, with a risk factor of three or more, no breast cancer exam this year, and who prefer contact by text message, you can do that," Newman says.

Want to know more about the cloud? Visit Light Reading Enterprise Cloud.

Salesforce also announced more than a dozen partners with apps that can be installed to Health Cloud via the Salesforce AppExchange, including Fitango Wellness Action Plan, FormFast for electronic healthcare forms, and Healthwise to coordinate care coordination teams.

The healthcare industry has been ripe for digital disruption, with mandates for electronic health records put in place by the Affordable Care Act -- although of course the future of the ACA is uncertain under the current Republican administration. Cloud vendors are stepping up, including Amazon Web Services Inc. , Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL).

Salesforce.com Inc. launched Health Cloud last year, introducing enhancements at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference in Orlando on Monday.

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— Mitch Wagner, Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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