Healthcare providers are faced with numerous challenges on a daily basis, like how to better manage patient data, improve communication and collaboration among teams, streamline processes, and improve patient outcomes. One solution that has proven to be highly effective in helping healthcare providers overcome these challenges is Salesforce.
Salesforce CRM offers a range of powerful tools and capabilities designed to help healthcare organizations face many of these problems in the industry and drive better outcomes for their patients.
In this blog, we will explore how Salesforce is helping healthcare professionals work these issues out, from improving patient engagement to gaining insights into operations and making data-driven decisions. Whether you are a healthcare provider looking to streamline processes or an organization seeking to improve patient outcomes, this blog will provide valuable insights into how Salesforce can help you achieve your goals.
1. Customization
Nowadays, consumers expect more personalized experiences everywhere they go, including their healthcare experience. Salesforce is highly customizable and allows healthcare organizations to tailor the platform to their specific needs and workflows.
By leveraging the power of Salesforce, healthcare providers can improve and personalize the patient experience, for example, by sending reminder text messages or calls to confirm an upcoming appointment where it includes the patient’s information, appointment date and time, and the name of the health provider they’ll be seeing or by following up a patient’s treatment with a personalized email to check in on their recovery and answer any questions they may have. This personalization makes the patient feels valued and respected, and leads to increased patient satisfaction and improved outcomes.
Moreover, Salesforce offers mobile access, which improves the management of patient communication and enables patients to manage their health information and communicate with their healthcare providers from anywhere, at any time, using their preferred ways to communicate, like calls, texts, or online Salesforce communities. This helps improve the patient/provider relationship.
Additionally, by using the functionalities of Salesforce CRM, healthcare providers can manage patient interactions and data and get more insights into the patient’s medical history or non-medical data, which can help with any special requirements needed by the patient or to understand and anticipate the patient’s needs.
Last but not least, Salesforce allows healthcare providers to create custom dashboards and reports tailored to their specific needs and goals, providing a much better understanding of their patients and leading to more personalized interactions with them.
2. Patient Engagement
Patient engagement is very important for healthcare professionals, as engaged patients are more likely to follow through with their healthcare and treatment plans, take a more active role in their own care, and better understand the treatment that was provided.
Additionally, engaged patients are more satisfied with their patient journey. They are more likely to refer others to these healthcare organizations, leading to higher patient loyalty and retention levels. Also, they will be more open to communicating with their healthcare providers, which can help them identify and address health concerns early on. This can also help healthcare professionals make more informed treatment decisions, leading to better health outcomes.
Salesforce provides healthcare professionals with a convenient platform to manage and track patient interactions and gain quick and handy access to all data and functionality. Also, it offers patient portals that provide patients with secure access to their health information and enables them to communicate with their healthcare providers. All this can help healthcare organizations build stronger relationships with their patients, improve patient engagement, and increase patient satisfaction.
3. Patient Data Management
Salesforce offers robust data management capabilities to help healthcare professionals automate patient data management, securely manage, track, store, and report sensitive patient information, and it provides a 360-degree view of every patient for a better understanding of their requirements and needs.
This is extremely important for healthcare organizations because they have large amounts of sensitive patient data coming from a wide variety of providers, electronic health records (EHR) systems, lab tests, billing, insurance claim systems, and more every day. And if all this data is siloed in numerous platforms, it can be very difficult to use or easy to misplace and lose because they have to manually process this sensitive information.
So, integrating Salesforce into your existing healthcare software infrastructure is a must if you want to improve your staff’s productivity, minimize errors in manual processes, and have a more secure and safe patient data management system.
4. Collaboration
‘‘Salesforce allows any patient’s care team member to view the patient’s care management plan, design tasks, and send messages from any device, increasing productivity and making the system interoperable.’’
When an organization receives a large amount of information from disparate platforms and systems on a daily basis, the collaboration between teams can be challenging.
Salesforce effortlessly allows data to be shared across departments to enable collaboration between the different teams in a Healthcare organization, helping them share information with ease and communicate more effectively with each other. This will improve coordination among teams and help reduce errors.
This is an essential feature of Salesforce, as it helps health systems to create a coordinated care experience. It allows any patient’s care team member to view the patient’s care management plan, design tasks, and send messages from any device, increasing productivity and making the system interoperable.
5. Integration
Salesforce has the ability to integrate with a wide range of healthcare-specific technologies and integrate the patient’s experience at different stages of their care journey. This feature provides a more comprehensive view of the patient’s medical history, lab results, and treatment history, leading to an improved and more accurate decision-making process. Additionally, third-party integrations can ensure that all this siloed patient data is accurately and securely collected in one place.
By bringing all this data together in one platform, you can make data management more accessible, streamline the workflow of your healthcare organization, eliminate manual double data entry, and improve data accuracy and completeness, as information is entered only once and can be shared among all relevant systems.
Furthermore, Salesforce has its own marketplace, called AppExchange, where healthcare organizations can find thousands of pre-built apps that are ready to be integrated into any Salesforce instance to immediately boost the platform’s functionality.
In short, by integrating your different platforms and EHR systems into Salesforce, you can actually improve the communication between various departments, help healthcare providers identify any patient safety issues faster, and ultimately lead to enhanced efficiency and cost savings.
6. Process Automation
One of the key characteristics of Salesforce is its variety of tools for automating workflows and processes, allowing healthcare providers to automate repetitive and manual tasks, making it easier for them to streamline their operations and reduce manual errors.
This is a necessity for healthcare professionals, as the benefits from process automation are many, such as freeing professionals from administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks, and providing a more personalized patient experience. This has become a tool for a successful business transformation.
By using Salesforce’s highly customizable interface, healthcare organizations can automate different processes like patient onboarding, insurance checking, tracking, and payments, health plan designing, health records gathering, medicine ordering and tracking, and more, saving healthcare professionals time so they can go back to focusing on what really matters, their patients.
7. Analytics and Insights
All these different bits and pieces of data can be difficult to analyze. However, Salesforce provides advanced analytics and reporting tools that allow healthcare organizations to:
- Gain insights into their operations.
- Identify areas for improvement.
- Make data-driven decisions to enhance patient outcomes.
Tableau CRM from Salesforce allows organizations to gain actionable insights to help anticipate and meet patient needs. Salesforce Health Cloud’s Risk Stratification feature enables you to identify at-risk patients through prebuilt dashboards to enroll them in a care management program in Health Cloud.
Moreover, Salesforce provides a centralized platform for storing and managing data and allows healthcare providers to create custom dashboards and reports that are tailored to their specific needs and goals.
8. Patient Data Security
As we mentioned before, healthcare organizations manage a lot of sensitive patient information, and data security is of the highest importance to them. A breach in data can endanger patient safety and cost healthcare businesses millions of dollars.
Salesforce helps organizations store and manage their patient data securely while also staying in compliance with HIPAA and HITRUST. Salesforce follows all government regulations on data security to operate and ensure customer confidence.
The CRM offers compliant solutions to enable the monitoring of data usage, encryption of sensitive patient’s data, the secure sharing of data between hospitals, retail pharmacies, and patients, and that electronically protected health information is only accessible by authorized users. One of these tools is Salesforce Shield, which works best in conjunction with Health Cloud.
In Summary
Salesforce offers a flexible, secure, and integrated platform for healthcare providers to manage their relationships with patients, improve collaboration, automate processes, keep patient data secure and gain insights into their operations. By leveraging these capabilities, healthcare providers can overcome many of the challenges faced in the industry and drive better outcomes for their patients.
However, all these benefits can fall flat if you don’t partner with a Salesforce Consulting firm with experience implementing Salesforce for the Healthcare industry. A Salesforce Consulting Partner knowledgeable about the Healthcare sectors’ needs and challenges can help you personalized the platform to your needs, is able to provide solutions for issues you might not have thought of, and can help you take the most advantage out of your Salesforce platform, making your money worth.
Cloudsquare is a Salesforce Consulting and ISV Partner with expertise in the Healthcare industry, having successfully completed dozens of projects in the sector. Our business experience, Salesforce skillset, and knowledge of the Healthcare industry make us the best partner to help you improve your patient relationship and bring the outcomes expected to grow your healthcare business.