Driving cloud-based patient engagement in healthcare

Covid 19 pandemic as well as the influx of digital health solutions have made patients digitally savvy. TeleHealth, Telemedicine, eConsult, Online triage, Remote Monitoring have become part of healthcare delivery. Hence healthcare organizations need to adopt comprehensive, patient-centric platforms which can improve patient engagement, enhance care coordination and provide intelligent insights, while ensuring easy scalability and HIPAA compliance. Salesforce Health Cloud is a leading platform, which provides unified view of patient to drive engagement & care. The article covers key features & benefits of Salesforce Health Cloud

Post Covid pandemic, patients have increasingly started relying on digital forms of communication and engagement. In other words, patients are now, more than ever, asking to be a part of their own health journeys.

As a result, other trends have surfaced which are driving the need for digital transformation in healthcare. These are:

• With people becoming far more digitally-savvy, the main route to book medical appointments or to research doctors, hospital and medical facilities is through digital channels.
• HCP’s have started leveraging Telemedicine, eConsult, Remote monitoring solutions for regular care delivery.
• Data & Analytics are driving healthcare operations like – lowering rate of medication errors, staff allocation, preventive care, etc.
• AI driven use cases in healthcare which help HCP’s predict illness, risk stratification and suggesting personalized treatments are getting acceptance.

These “digihealth” services have been proven to improve patient relationships, care, and medical outcomes. However, as they rely extensively on data, providers looking to enable such solutions must first invest in unlocking the data buried in legacy systems and electronic health records (EHRs).

To use this data, Salesforce Health Cloud comes into play. Its customer-360 view is designed to improve patient satisfaction, deliver high-quality patient care, and deliver positive outcomes.

Rich contextual patient profiles

With 60% of patients having to manage their care between different providers, it can be challenging to have all patient data available at the right time. Health Cloud offers healthcare providers a 360-patient view. In other words, this holistic view includes data like demographics, communications, clinical, and non-clinical data, information from the EHR, membership and claims systems, and wearables.

Providers can, for example, integrate data from a patient’s electronic health record including the patient’s current status, medications, and appointment history. These rich contextual patient profiles therefore give providers the ability to see and understand the patient’s history and makes clinical decisions based on that.

This is especially relevant and helpful where patients are receiving long-term medication, or when a specific patient is under the care of several health care providers.

Also, Health Cloud makes it possible to integrate with patients’ medical devices and wearables, making the real-time and up to date information available to the care team. This is especially helpful in post-discharge care, and for patients with diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, epilepsy, and other chronic medical conditions.

Access to patient information and tasks

Now, it wouldn’t be of much use if the information gathered in these rich patients’ profiles weren’t easily accessible. Often, healthcare providers must go to multiple sources to find information on one patient. This wastes time and makes for a poor user experience. Not only that, but it also increases the possibility that vital care information can be missed at a crucial time.

Fortunately, this information is stored in one place in the cloud. Providers can therefore access a single view of the patient. This can include things like care plans, timelines, clinical and non-clinical data, and other records. Being available at the click of a button, this not only makes patient care more efficient, but also gives providers access to the latest patient information wherever they are.

And having a single dashboard with all the patient’s information makes it easy to schedule tasks and automate large parts of a provider’s workflow like setting reminders for tasks and sending reminders to patients. This makes providers even more efficient and improves the care of patients.

Having all the information available in one place also brings the connected patient to the forefront. In other words, it enables care teams and patients to collaborate seamlessly.

For example, care coordinators can assign tasks within the caregiver network and providers can send secure text messages to patients’ mobile devices. This meets patients’ communication expectations, makes for a more personalized experience, improves their satisfaction, and fosters stronger relationships between providers and patients.

Productivity tools

To improve provider productivity, Salesforce Health Cloud contains several tools providers can incorporate into their workflows to make their jobs easier, make them more productive, and improve patient care. For example, Health Cloud incorporates:

• Care plans: Providers can create, manage, and customise care plans to manage everything from simple check-ups to more complex cases like those patients with chronic conditions. It also allows providers to provide preventative care and apply health and wellness protocols to care plans. Providers also use care plan templates to create customised plans quickly and easily and use concurrent care plans with patients with multiple conditions.
• Household mappings: These maps give providers a complete view of the people under their care, including their care plans, caregivers, households, businesses, and all other individuals that are involved in the patient’s care.
• Assessments:  Through assessments, providers can improve the quality of patient care by gathering information that helps to manage patients more efficiently. These assessment or surveys can be sent to patients from the Health Cloud console and providers have a record of the responses as they are received.

Salesforce Health Cloud natively provides robust security features at the infrastructure, network, and infrastructure levels. It does this through Salesforce Shield, a premium set of integrated services built into the Salesforce platform. Shield protects patient data in the following ways:

• Event Monitoring. Healthcare providers can see what medical data medical staff is accessing, when they accessed it, and from where it was accessed. Multiple members in a provider network can access this data or a single record, and event monitoring can give an indication if there is any warnings signs in this usage behaviour. This can, for example, include things like sudden downloads of data and data being accessed from places outside the norm.
• Transaction Security. Shield can be set up to notify security teams or administrators when an unauthorised employee purposely, or inadvertently attempts to access or print a patient’s health data. It also allows the blocking of certain types of activities as they happen and require some other form of authentication for certain events.
• Field Audit Trail. By having all the information available in the cloud, providers can go back to any information that may have been changed. Here, Shield’s Field Audit Trail allows providers to easily pinpoint and find mistakes in patient records. This ensures that patient records are always accurate and that patients are given the best care possible.
• Platform encryption. Shield’s Platform Encryption makes it easy to encrypt data by using certified standards, while making every field “encryption-aware”. This means that fields like workflows, search, and more still function even though the data is encrypted. With this capability, security is not sacrificed in favour of usability.

Conclusion

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital health solutions, making cloud-based patient engagement essential. Salesforce Health Cloud offers a unified view of patient data, enhancing care coordination and patient satisfaction. With features like rich contextual patient profiles, access to patient information, and productivity tools, healthcare providers can deliver high-quality care efficiently. Embracing cloud-based solutions ensures scalability, HIPAA compliance, and improved patient outcomes, positioning healthcare organizations for success in the digital age.