Dive Brief:
- Salesforce is launching two new features to Health Cloud aimed at improving care coordination across diverse care teams, the company announced Thursday.
- Health Cloud Employer allows doctors, nurses and other care providers to engage with other care teams from any device and anywhere. Special functions include the ability to view and communicate with entire care teams, assign patient care plans and related tasks for patients to perform.
- Concurrent Care Plans allows multiple care teams to collaborate on multiple care plans for patients with comorbid conditions. The feature also assigns permissions for who has access to patient data.
Dive Insight:
Salesforce has been entering the healthcare space in full force now that it is being digitized. The San Francisco-based CRM firm also announced two new apps that are available on Health Cloud: myStrength’s Digital Behavioral Health Resources and RELATIENT’s RideToHealth app, which books and manages Uber rides to and from healthcare facilities.
Last year, Salesforce added telehealth features to its Health Cloud patient relationship management solution, enabling two-way video chat between patients and their care teams from any mobile device. A 2016 Salesforce survey found 62% of Americans with a primary care provider and health coverage are open to virtual health visits.
Salesforce is one of a number of tech giants that are carving out a space in healthcare. Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Samsung are all leveraging information and analytics tools to solve healthcare solutions — patient-engagement technologies to hospital smart rooms and artificial intelligence. Driving activity is the confluence of value-based policies and regulations, technological innovation and financial incentives that reward improved outcomes and reduced costs.
Providers are looking for solutions to help them increase patient engagement and improve the patient experience. In March, Salesforce secured Mount Sinai Health System as a Health Cloud client. The cloud-based platform will help manage relationships between more than 100,000 providers, 350,000 Medicaid beneficiaries and 200 entities, including hospitals, substance abuse treatment centers, homeless shelters and social service agencies.