Salesforce in the healthcare industry: capabilities, applications, alternatives

Salesforce in the healthcare industry: capabilities, applications, alternatives
PUBLISHED
July 11, 2023
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As the pioneer in client relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce is now one of the leading platforms offering a rich collection of products, solutions, and tools far beyond CRM possibilities. According to Fortune, Salesforce is the second most innovative company in the United States, followed by Alphabet.   

Throughout the years, Salesforce gained a reputation as a trusted advisor and partner among thousands of companies across the world’s fourteen largest industries, including life sciences and healthcare.  

In this article, we’ll explore typical cases of healthcare companies using Salesforce, review the functionality of Salesforce CRM and the solutions for different sectors within life sciences and healthcare, and discover how Salesforce supports healthcare companies and communities. 

How is Salesforce Used in Healthcare? A Few Typical Cases

For years, Salesforce’s mission in life sciences and healthcare has been the same – to be one of the main drivers for digital transformation and put relationships with organizations at the heart of activity.  

The number of cases of using Salesforce in healthcare is numerous and diverse. Professionals of all sorts use Salesforce in healthcare organizations of all kinds. Both enterprises and non-profits entered the Salesforce environment to match their needs and fulfill their goals.  

A non-profit organization that raises money to enhance the quality of children’s healthcare used multiple Salesforce products to build an advanced data-driven system based on a database of 700,000 donor prospects.  

After using Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud to track donor activity, the organizations added to the cloud CRM analytics and Einstein Discovery AI (now Einstein GPT) to get a 360-degree view of the donor pipeline and actionable insights for its optimization.  

The largest non-profit provider of behavioral healthcare in California used Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud to meet the increasing demand for mental health services and automate their workflow. The provider’s team used to spend 80 hours processing a list of potential clients. With Salesforce, they do it for 15 minutes.  

Humana, a US-based health insurance company, took advantage of a few Salesforce products at once to build a single view around their customers. The Humana team integrated with:  

  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud to personalize 60 different prospect journeys and attract 1,000 interested employer leads per year;
  • MuleSoft API to boost delivery speed four times;
  • Salesforce Health Cloud to provide doctors with patient data, such as medical history, medications, and lifestyles;  
  • Salesforce Commerce Cloud to make sure that patients receive their prescriptions at the right time.  

Lilly, an American pharmaceutical enterprise, used the Customer 360 platform to develop and launch over 50 apps to achieve a higher level of customer-centricity and improve internal coordination across departments and locations.

Salesforce CRM for Healthcare: Solutions’ Overview

Salesforce healthcare CRM is a product used by top enterprises in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and life sciences industries. They opt for the platform for high targeted care opportunities, cloud data security, patient engagement, remote patient monitoring, and many other goals.  

Salesforce implementation in health care narrows down to six sectors of activity: 

  • Providers.  
  • Payers.
  • Pharma.
  • MedTech.  
  • Public Sector Health.

Every sector includes solutions developed specifically according to its needs and particularities.

Solutions for Providers 

Scale Patient Access and Services solution allows healthcare providers to receive a holistic view of patient data in a single place, including risk level, outreach frequency, contact preferences, conditions, caregivers, medications, allergies, member details, electronic health records, coverage details, care requests, cases, and engagement history. 

Also, providers can easily find and schedule appointments for patients and empower them to complete pre-visit and post-visit activities. 

Personalized Patient Acquisition & Outreach solution allows healthcare providers to generate demand and nurture relationships using marketing tools to collect and segment customer data across multiple channels, manage omnichannel campaigns on a single platform, and create personalized journeys for new and current patients based on their preferences and needs. 

With this solution, a patient can quickly find and schedule appointments, while a healthcare provider can share surveys to collect feedback on treatment and improve future experiences. The solution also includes CRM analytics for Salesforce Health Cloud that allows care coordinators to monitor all the data in a single place to measure the effectiveness of created journeys and improve them. 

Solutions for Payers

Trusted Contact Center solution allows healthcare payers to leverage customer support and increase agent productivity with the advanced member service console powered by Salesforce Health Cloud, launch an AI-powered chatbot to simplify communication and create personalized experiences, and see all available information about each member. 

Connected Network Management solution allows healthcare organizations to ensure quality outreach by creating tailored omnichannel journeys based on the provider’s personal and professional information, such as network preferences, specialty, NPI number, and primary service locations. Organizations can use pre-built integrations to simplify credentialing, while an intuitive dashboard will help them optimize contracting activities. 

Scale Member Management solution allows different types of managers to improve their cooperation, guide members through their journey, and improve health outcomes using a complete view of the customer, which provides relevant member information such as preferences, member plans, and health timelines showing clinical and customer service events. With CRM analytics for Salesforce Health Cloud, managers can identify high-risk members and measure care program success across member populations.

Solutions for Pharma

Enhance Patient Services solution allows pharmaceutical companies to establish closer relationships with patients and providers using a single platform to deliver personalized engagement and support programs for better adherence with automated workflows. 

With clinical, social, and adherence metrics, coordinators can receive all the necessary insights to offer patients the best actions and recommendations. With CRM analytics for Salesforce Health Cloud, coordinators can track and monitor patients’ care plans and prioritize patients who face health barriers. 

Scale Advanced Therapies solution allows stakeholders to track the chain of custody in real time, manage sell orders, and quickly identify and deal with issues to avoid expensive delays. 

Based on patient appointment information, treatment coordinators can use pre-built and automated workflows that calculate the appropriate appointment chains to get patients scheduled faster. Laboratory technicians can easily verify patient data, record vitals, confirm cold chain complaints, and print unique sample barcodes. 

With the help of these codes, manufacturers can receive all the information they need to update the record and its status. If delays occur, stakeholders can receive actionable insights from Einstein GPT. With the integration of Slack, stakeholders can enhance collaboration, receive updates, and eliminate bottlenecks.  

Accelerate Clinical Trials solution allows life sciences companies to unite with trial teams and speed up innovations by configuring all the necessary apps and letting everyone cooperate at each clinical trial phase, such as study analysis, site selection, study initiation, and trial implementation. 

Teams can store all critical documentation, access it anytime, and share it with researchers and other stakeholders. Analytics enables every stakeholder with a complete view of every activity and empowers them with real-time updates on study initiation and subject enrollment to define the next best steps. 

Salesforce Health Cloud keeps all clinical data safe and provides the trial team with enhanced collaboration opportunities, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud personalizes emails and SMS to keep trial participants up to date. 

Solutions for MedTech

Drive Intelligent Sales solution allows sales teams that offer medical devices to connect with each other, get a complete picture of a customer, and find the best leads to close more deals faster.  

With an advanced lead nurturing system, sales and marketing professionals can engage with the right prospects by delivering the right message at the right time. They can work in one place to coordinate their actions and monitor leads, conversions, and campaigns.  

Artificial intelligence helps MedTech companies to capture events and contacts, see new opportunities, and prioritize sales efforts.  

Modernize Commercial Operations solution allows companies that sell medical devices to consolidate all data in one place, assign tasks, automate workflows, and receive insights for better decision-making. 

Working together in one place, multiple teams can optimize manufacturing and scheduling for prosthetics and implants, check product availability and prevent delays, use forecasting algorithms to analyze and improve performance, enhance document management, negotiate complex deals with intelligent quoting, and beyond. 

Optimize Field Inventory Management solution allows medical device sales representatives to view upcoming visits to medical specialists and the necessary products with automated authorization flow and intelligent sales.  

A mobile app provides reps with a comprehensive view of their product data, such as quantity, serial numbers, order amount, shipping addresses, customer signatures, and consents for billing. With a built-in barcode scanner, reps can enter product serial numbers. 

The solution can help MedTech companies manage product shortfalls, reduce discrepancies, and simplify inventory cycle counts analysis.

Solutions for Public Sector Health 

Streamline Crisis Support Coordination solution allows healthcare organizations to help patients deal with psychological health conditions, crises, and treatment by creating end-to-end journeys. 

Salesforce help crisis specialists of different levels and areas optimize their operations using pre-built tools, evaluate health risks and manage them with surveys, triage logic, and recommendations from artificial intelligence. 

Build Integrated Care Programs solution offers the same opportunities as Salesforce solutions for providers, so we’ll skip it and move next. 

Manage Health Data with Transparency solution allows local health authorities to provide advanced patient care, predict better health outcomes, and improve patient satisfaction.  

A disease surveillance app allows healthcare organizations to engage patients who address their problems online and in real time with the medical specialists they need. With an advanced command center, healthcare professionals can provide personalized care by seeing the patient’s healthcare journey, checking procedure manuals and best practices for specific investigations, connecting to department communication channels, and viewing current tasks. 

Now that you know the solutions offered by Salesforce for healthcare and life sciences companies, let’s find out more details about the communities that support them. 

Salesforce Communities for Healthcare, Certified Third-Party App Developers, and Mentors 

For companies and non-profits in healthcare and life sciences, Salesforce offers a variety of resources to learn more details about using its products and solutions. 

Trailblazer Community is a place where employees of a healthcare organization or company can connect with their colleagues who are already taking advantage of Salesforce and discuss all interested topics.  

For instance, if your team wants to know more about Salesforce healthcare automation, they can find the discussion group they need by choosing specific filters. 

IdeaExchange Community is a forum where Salesforce users share unique experiences to use products, services, and solutions more effectively, eliminate issues that occurred during their workflows, and discover something they didn’t know about. 

Also, Salesforce launched its Salesforce+, the free streaming service that highlights a long list of Salesforce offline events, which is helpful if your healthcare business is interested in the environment. For instance, if you’re wondering about the Salesforce healthcare technology roadmap, you can watch nine episodes from the Dreamforce series.

Salesforce Healthcare Benefits – Are They Real?

Salesforce has a massive impact on the healthcare system by providing everything for healthcare workers to improve patient communication, medical services, and patient experience. 

It’s so groundbreaking that, for instance, primary care physicians don’t have to see patients personally because they can access all healthcare information and nonclinical data they need, such as care journeys, patient profiles, and social determinants.

Salesforce is also a good choice for any company that works in pharmaceuticals, MedTech, and insurance. The software incorporates multiple systems powered by next-generation functionality to let a business see the big picture, increase productivity, eliminate data silos, and reduce spending.

Viseven team has certified Salesforce specialists on board. Get in touch to see how we can help with the SF product suite or integrations.