Salesforce Health Cloud gets “care from anywhere” updates ahead of HIMSS21 conference

On Monday, Salesforce announced multiple updates for Health Cloud, the software-as-a-service company’s industry-specific cloud for healthcare and life sciences organizations. These updates are being announced the same week as the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s HIMSS21 conference in Las Vegas. Dr. Geeta Nayyar, Salesforce’s Executive Medical Director and General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences, will be delivering a keynote at the event.

This year, Salesforce has launched new healthcare-related products as well as updating existing ones. In January, it launched Vaccine Cloud to help public sector and businesses manage COVID-19 vaccinations. In April, the company updated Vaccine Cloud to improve vaccination appointment scheduling . The latest updates to Health Cloud continues that trend.

“For years, the healthcare system has struggled to catch up with the innovation we were seeing across other industries, but the pandemic forced us to accelerate digital transformation and provide the healthcare system with digital-first, always-on and patient-focused solutions” said Kevin Riley, SVP and GM of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Salesforce, in a press release. “These new care from anywhere innovations ensure that we continue this digital transformation in healthcare and empower providers, payers, care coordinators and pharmaceutical companies to deliver care for patients wherever they are.”

The four updates announced today are:

Remote Patient Exception Monitoring for Health Cloud: This feature will let doctors, nurses and care coordinators monitor a patient’s health conditions remotely by displaying “data and insights from connected devices directly within a single dashboard.”

Intelligent Appointment Management for Health Cloud: This feature allows patients to schedule appointments through a self-service portal via their laptop, desktop or mobile device, or it can be used by call center agents who assist patients with scheduling. Pre-visit questionnaires, customized by appointment type, can be added to the scheduling process to reduce patient check-in times.

Medication Management for Health Cloud: Using this feature, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare providers can create a single, consolidated list of a patient’s current and previous medications. The system also integrates with RxNorm, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)’s normalized naming system for generic and branded drugs.

HIPAA Compliance for Salesforce Maps, B2C Commerce, and Salesforce Order Management: With HIPAA compliance, Salesforce Maps, as well as Territory Planning and LiveTracking, can be fully used within Health Cloud. For example, in-home health care companies could use Maps as part of their scheduling and dispatch systems. HIPPA compliance for Salesforce B2C Commerce and Order Management means healthcare companies can new create ecommerce stores and fulfill patient orders through those systems.

Salesforce Industry Cloud roadmap

Healthcare was one of the first industry-specific cloud products Salesforce launched in 2016, along with financial services. Today, the company has 16 different “industry clouds,” and it continues to launch new products and enhance its existing offerings.

During the Salesforce Industries Summit event in June 2021, I spoke with Jujhar Singh, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Salesforce Industry Clouds, about how  Salesforce Industries fits into the company as a whole and what industries the company is looking to offer vertical solutions for in the future.

During our conversation, I also asked Singh about how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the company’s plans for industry clouds. He told me that many industries are reimagining the way they operate, and companies have accelerated their existing digital transformation journeys. Today’s updates to Health Cloud are another way Salesforce hopes to help its healthcare and life science customers do just that. And I don’t see the company slowing down anytime soon.

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