And 63% would be interested in proactively providing their health data from wearables to their doctors, so they can monitor their well-being. Familiarity with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and other legal requirements soon followed, he said, making it a manageable leap for Salesforce to begin catering to hospitals and doctor’s offices. A timeline view reveals a patient’s progression, while a Patient Caregiver Map highlights household members as well as all providers and specialists involved in a patient’s care. If Salesforce’s approach is successful, however, it could significantly change the way medical providers and patients relate. With Health Cloud, patients will also be able to access their medical community via mobile and desktop devices via the Salesforce Community Cloud that works on iOS and Android devices. The patient, in turn, can view their health records, ask questions, fill out questionnaires about upcoming visits, and set up reminders for appointments and prescription refills.
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But those systems are more suited to the needs of physicians and administrators than those of patients, Newman said. At the same time, expectations of patients have shifted, as younger generations – digital natives who grew up with iPhones, Facebook and Fitbits – are demanding that providers offer more tech-savvy ways of managing their care.
The catch is that health care is a splintered market with multiple electronic record systems already in place. You can’t get your lab results. “We built these systems for not-health-care”. The company has geared its health care effort around a strategy that involves sticking to its knitting in customer relationship management software, or CRM. For example, Salesforce recently introduced a product for wealth-management advisers.
With its Health Cloud, Salesforce is trying to be the front end system for medical providers to manage patient relationships and bring electronic medical records, wearable data and other information together in one dashboard.
“We’ve been in healthcare from the beginning”, said Joshua Newman, the company’s chief medical officer and general manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences.
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The game for Salesforce is to expand into new industries with a customer based focus. In the past, providers have tried to keep patient communication to a minimum, he said. “Every single other industry is moving to this”. The company released its new Service Cloud Lightning Console and a new Service Wave Analytics App with the promise it would help customer service agents do their jobs better through improved experiences and analytics.
