Health IT, Patient Engagement

Three takes on the new Salesforce Health Cloud

"This is not a new type of product."

Technology juggernaut Salesforce faces a fair amount of skepticism with its new Salesforce Health Cloud aggregation platform.

But three industry experts who reviewed an advanced copy of the Health Cloud announcement provided by MedCity News said they are open to thinking Salesforce’s healthcare offering could be viable.

The CIO

“This is not a new type of product,” said Dave Holland, interim CIO at Union Hospital in Terre Haute, Indiana, and chairman of the Illinois Health Information Exchange Authority. Holland has used Salesforce products outside of healthcare before.

Yet, Holland said data aggregation for relationship management “is a great idea in concept” because only 20 percent of healthcare services are delivered in hospitals, yet data flow today seems to be hospital-centric.

From a CIO’s perspective, an ideal product, according to Holland, would incorporate data from hospital and ambulatory sources, give providers the ability to track Meaningful Use compliance, let patients input their own data without compromising records entered by professionals and, of course, have the necessary HIPAA privacy and security controls.

“In theory, [Salesforce Health Cloud] looks pretty good,” Holland said, but he wonders if a non-healthcare company is the best source of such a platform right now. “The vendors that are better positioned to deliver this are the EHR vendors themselves,” Holland said.

Holland said he would prefer if patient portals and communication hubs revolved around primary care physicians. Holland said. “But the way Meaningful Use is set up, portals are around multiple providers.” Thus, providers have a financial incentive to create their own patient portals in isolation rather than build something more amenable to care coordination.

The connectivity specialist

Tim Gee, a healthcare connectivity consultant in Beaverton, Oregon, wondered if Salesforce has what it takes to succeed in healthcare. “How will they aggregate a critical mass of patient data?” Gee asked. He noted that Salesforce integration partner MultiSoft had not previously been in healthcare.

“They’ve made a very big, broad set of claims,” Gee told MedCity News.

“What struck me [about Salesforce Health Cloud] is that it’s an interstitial solution,” one in an immature market, Gee said. “Many buyers don’t realize they’re buying an interstitial solution.”

He also said that messaging middleware, which the Salesforce platform is in some ways, is not new.

However, he sees a big market opportunity in the realm of interoperability, which the Salesforce platform apparently facilitates. “There’s a growing need for solutions that automate workflow between trading partners,” Gee said.

The biggest question Gee has is about the scope of Salesforce’s ambitions in healthcare.

“What’s their position on being regulated by the FDA?” he asked. Nothing in the initial release of Health Cloud appears to be subject to FDA regulation, but if Salesforce eventually offers features that serve therapeutic or diagnostic purposes, the federal agency might take interest, Gee said.

The entrepreneur

Health IT consultant, engineer and entrepreneur Shahid Shah said that the general direction of Salesforce concentrating on “relationships” rather than “records” is “very important for population health.”

But he, too, wonders if Salesforce isn’t trying to do too much.

“I like that they’re focused on the complete view of patient data, but without demographic-, treatment-, or condition-specific special views, it’s hard to manage population cohorts,” Shah said in an e-mail.

“Their EHR integrations story is pretty interesting,” Shah said. “It will be really good to keep an eye on that capability. It’s not hard to pull it off technically, but very difficult logistically trying to connect and integrate data from various systems.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Shares0
Shares0