Salesforce Health Cloud expands at-home capabilities

Salesforce Health Cloud expands at-home capabilities unknown

Salesforce is targeting home health with its latest healthcare software capabilities, the San Francisco-based company said Thursday morning.

Salesforce is adding a home health component to its Health Cloud software solution this summer that will automate the intake and scheduling processes for patients with in-home treatments. The plan is to target home healthcare providers and payers in the United States. It did not name any specific launch customers for this solution.

Related: Is Salesforce the big tech company that figured out healthcare?

Amit Khanna, Salesforce’s senior vice president and general manager of healthcare and life sciences, said the company is bullish on home health because it's what consumers want and it decreases the overall cost of care.

“Home health needs a lot of things [customer relationship managemnet] offers. It needs relationships. It needs operations. It needs efficiency. It needs intelligence. And then obviously care at home. This fits right into the DNA of our company,” said Khanna, who added the company views its system as complementary to the EHR. “We are not the system to provide care at the point of care inside hospitals.”

Khanna sees an opportunity in the home health space for technology focused on customer relationship management.

Home Health capabilities include allowing non-clinical employees to access certain data from the EHR to aid scheduling. It also added the ability to streamline a scheduler's ability to convert prior authorizations into scheduled visits based on patient's availability and overall preferences. Another new product the company added as a part of the launch is Data Cloud for Healthcare, which will allows providers and life science organizations to connect clinical and non-clinical patient data and fully understand the patient profile in real-time helping to pinpoint things like potential risks, determine therapeutic approaches, and educate patients with personalized communication.

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In recent years, Salesforce has quietly become a bigger player in healthcare. Salesforce’s customer base has grown to include health systems, insurance companies, public health departments, pharmaceutical and life sciences firms, retail health, digital health companies and more. Providers are increasingly looking to connect their EHR systems with customer relationship management software capabilities as the industry shifts to more consumer-focused technology.

"We think electronic medical records are a system of record,” Khanna said. “We bring engagement, operational efficiency and intelligence to those systems.”

Morgan Griffith, chief product officer at Cincinnati, Ohio-based Bon Secours Mercy Health, said her system has invested in customer relationship management technology to better connect with patients.

“Our EHR is the clinical source of truth,” Griffith said. “But what it doesn't do very well is take that kind of engagement-level set of needs that patients and consumers have, and make the clinical data actionable.”

Despite its investments in healthcare, Salesforce has had its share of challenges thanks to a difficult economic environment. In January, the company announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce or 7,000 employees. A spokesperson did not respond to a request for a comment on whether this layoff affected its healthcare division.

This story first appeared in Digital Health Business & Technology.