Health IT

Salesforce adds telemedicine to Health Cloud platform

The technology is a home-grown "snap-in" for video chats called Salesforce SOS, originally developed for the company's core Service Cloud CRM platform.

Salesforce Health Cloud telemedicine

Salesforce is adding video telemedicine capabilities to its fairly new Health Cloud data aggregation and patient relationship management platform. While the company expects this new feature to disrupt the field of patient engagement, it also apparently faces a lot of skepticism.

Thursday, San Francisco-based Salesforce is introducing a telemedicine plug-in for Health Cloud, a platform announced last September and brought it to market just before the start of HIMSS16 at the end of February. The technology is a home-grown “snap-in” for video chats called Salesforce SOS, originally developed for the company’s core Service Cloud platform for customer relationship management. It’s now being offered in Health Cloud for $150 per user per month.

Salesforce SOS works on both computers and mobile devices and includes screen-sharing capabilities as well as one- and two-way video chatting. Dr. Joshua Newman, general manager of Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences, said the technology offers real-time support, “contextual care” and easy patient access.

He explained that contextual care means that Health Cloud aggregates patient information from multiple sources and helps clinicians and case managers create and execute care plans, right on the same screen as the video chat window. “This is really one of the coolest things about it in my mind,” Newman said.

The video chat then gets logged into each patient’s “health timeline” on Health Cloud, product marketing manager Frances Chang explained.

“This is about reimagining patient engagement,” making it truly personal and in real time, Newman said.

Newman said he sees SOS as suitable for “prehab” to prep patients in the days before surgical procedures. It should prove useful for providers in risk-based reimbursement models and “those who want to do a good job with bundled payments.”

It also could be used for patient education, health coaching and as a high-tech replacement for nurse call centers, according to Salesforce.

“It’s for small interventions that can be addressed in just a few minutes,” Newman explained. SOS for Health Cloud likely will be adopted by those managing the care of sick people at high risk of being hospitalized, he surmised.

“My motivation is the importance of all of the things we know we should be doing but haven’t been doing very well at,” said Newman. This includes prevention, communication and relationship-building. “Our sweet spot has been relationships,” Newman said.

Newman talked of “rapid iteration” of Health Cloud — the ability to adopt and scale it quickly within an organization. There may be a hill to climb to get to that point, however.

“We’ve shown it to a lot of people,” Newman said. “Organizations are not quite ready to stand up huge video call centers.”

But he did say that Health Cloud has been well-received in the marketplace since Salesforce first introduced it nearly a year ago. This is the first major update since the launch, but an interim release put in support for multiple languages, Newman said.

San Francisco based company expects to add features each time it releases a new version of Health Cloud platform, about three times a year. “Every four months, you’ll get something new,” Newman said. Expect another major Health Cloud even sooner than that, though, since Dreamforce 2016, the company’s huge annual conference in San Francisco, is set for the first week of October.

Photo: Salesforce

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