Six months after the initial introduction, Salesforce on Monday morning announced the general release of Salesforce Health Cloud, touted as a patient relationship management platform. The San Francisco-based customer relationship management giant released the product just ahead of the opening of HIMSS16 in Las Vegas.
Salesforce is touting Health Cloud as a means to pull in and manage data patient from multiple sources, from electronic health records to wearable fitness trackers. It’s also a communications platform for care coordination and patient engagement, as well as a dashboard for outcomes management and population health.
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“We’ve seen a ton of interest from life science companies, especially pharma and device companies,” said Dr. Joshua Newman, CMO and general manager of Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences. For example, joint replacement manufacturer DJO Global is an early partner, Newman said, because bundled surgical payments give implant makers a greater financial incentive to make sure procedures are effective.
While some see Health Cloud as competition for EHRs and analytics software, it is one of many products fighting it out in the crowded healthcare data aggregation arena. Newman said that he would love to see EHR vendors become Salesforce partners. However, he said CRM is hard “when the technology is built to keep data in,”
Newman said plenty of other healthcare companies, including providers, have already shown tremendous interest. “We were oversubscribed to the pilot program within two weeks,” Newman said.
That pilot really resulted in just “small tweaks” to the beta version of Health Cloud, which was built on the well-established Salesforce Service Cloud. The presence of Service Cloud shortened to-market time. “A year ago, we hadn’t even started development,” Newman said.
The Genen Group, a mental health practice affiliated with Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, is among the early users. On Health Cloud, the practice is building a mobile app to send push notifications to patients and allow those patients to schedule appointments, check insurance benefits and learn their out-of-pocket responsibility on their smartphones.
“At the end of the day, our core goal is to make our patients happy, and Health Cloud is giving us the capabilities to provide better experiences for everyone involved,” founder Lawrence Genen said in a statement supplied by Salesforce.
Salesforce also revealed a long list of vendor and consulting partners, including Philips, Catalyze, Healthwise, TigerText, Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Photos: Salesforce
