Salesforce Health Cloud reinvents the way care coordinators engage with patients, by offering a consolidated view of their records, access to the care team, and other relevant tools to deliver the ideal, high-quality healthcare service. It helps you deliver outstanding patient care, which is more than just managing their information. The cloud helps create a strong, collaborative, and lasting connection between patients and caregivers. In order to ensure that you’re maximizing its capabilities, it’s important you implement it properly. Here are a few tips to help along the way.
Also Read: The Complete Guide to Salesforce Health Cloud
Salesforce Health Cloud has numerous data models and features for specific use cases in the healthcare industry, such as life sciences program enrolment, patient specialty referrals, insurance claims pre-authorizations, etc. A traditional healthcare company likely doesn’t need each of these diverse features, so installing them all can create an unnecessarily complex Salesforce instance. Doing this will only clutter your org with unnecessary objects, fields, record types, and metadata–just to name a few. And removing these once you realize you’ve got a mess on your hands will be a heavy lift. Determine your organization's use cases and process requirements first, followed by exploring the various managed and unmanaged packages available, so you can determine what capabilities align with your needs. As time goes on, you can always discover what additional features you need and keep configuring to meet your needs. New implementations and configurations usually take less time and effort compared to clean-up work.
Salesforce is constantly reiterating and making platform improvements available with system updates. We recommend Health Cloud customers take advantage of the tools that are readily available before considering custom solutions, to avoid unnecessary costs and complexity. As the platform evolves, Salesforce is committed to making sure the Health Cloud supports and integrates seamlessly with most healthcare processes and systems. The Health Cloud documentation itself recommends you to “extend it, not replace it".
Standard email functionality will not work if you need to send confidential information to a patient or another provider outside your Salesforce org. Content management systems come with strict, secure patient messaging requirements, so common tools like Gmail or Outlook will not support them. You should also consider if patients need to send attachments, sign consent forms, and/or answer health care questionnaires during your process. Each capability should be determined beforehand when selecting an email solution. Health Cloud has tools to assist with some of these use cases, but you may determine a third-party solution like Zix, Paubox, Formstack is a better fit for you. If you make this decision early on in the process, you'll know ahead of time what additional licensing costs and development time it will take, and making a decision later could slow down your implementation phase later.
Salesforce Health Cloud eliminates the need to switch between applications to find required data on a patient. This is achieved by aggregating data from the various systems in the healthcare continuum and presenting it as a single, comprehensive patient record. However, Salesforce Health Cloud is not intended to serve as an EHR, it is meant to complement your EHR platform. And problems arise when EHRs and other clinical systems only have HL7 APIs available, which, unfortunately, Salesforce isn't able to communicate with directly. This makes it imperative for you to procure a middleware like MuleSoft or Redox to bridge the gap. On the other hand, if you happen to have a system that has a JSON API–which can be integrated directly with Salesforce, you can build your custom integration without another middleware.
A Person Account stores an individual's information by combining certain Account and Contact fields to form a single record for a person’s data. Person Accounts are a connection between Accounts and Contacts, flexible enough to act as an Account when required, and give you the ability to build better relationships with patients. Person Accounts are generally frowned upon by most Salesforce admins, due to the unnecessary complexity it brings into an organization, the risk associated, and the fact that once the feature is on, it cannot be turned off. However, when you use them in the right data model, Person Accounts can be powerful and simplify communications and support. With Person Accounts, users no longer need to associate a company with a Contact, since the Contact gets created and associated with the Account by default whenever a Person Account is created. So, when a user tries to view a Contact associated with a Person Account, they will be redirected to the Account record. This means they can manage both business Account records and their individual Accounts by simply navigating to the Accounts tab. With Person Accounts in Health Cloud, you save yourself the hassles of making huge customizations, you can use standard objects and fields for relationships, and you can display them graphically as well.
Our team of Salesforce Health Cloud experts can help build the perfect working model, with the best integrations for other third-party systems, like EHR, Laboratory Platforms, insurance portals, etc. We are AppShark – a Ridge-level Certified Salesforce Partner, specializing in the implementation, customization, and integration of Salesforce solutions. We provide both project-based and monthly Managed Services to companies of all sizes. If you’re ready to update your antiquated systems with a more robust solution to serve your patients and simplify your processes, we’d be happy to help! better patient access, patient engagement, physician relationship management, care coordination, and more.
Contact us or mail us at sales@appshark.com