One of the most crucial components of Salesforce's vertical strategy is healthcare, and with the general availability of Health Cloud this week, it's worth taking a look under the covers. First, here are some of the key details of the product, from Salesforce's announcement at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference:
Salesforce Health Cloud enables more personalized care through:
Complete patient views: Health Cloud puts all patient information in one place, including a Timeline view, demographic and family information and a functional diagram of the extended care team. Health Cloud also integrates with EHRs to make real-time patient data easily visible and actionable from any device, giving caregivers the information they need to manage patients anytime and from anywhere.
Smarter patient management: Health Cloud provides a single console for managing patients, allowing caregivers to create more efficient workflows and improve the quality of patient experiences, while also reducing costs by improving collaboration across teams. Care teams can take action on open tasks, create customized care plans for individuals and manage groups of patients, such as those with high-blood pressure or diabetes.
Connected patient engagement: Health Cloud enables caregivers and patients to send and receive messages, get reminders and complete surveys from any device, encouraging them to stay on top of their health goals.
"Salesforce needs avenues for growth and verticalizing its capabilities is a key strategy," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "And Salesforce's horizontal capabilities bring a lot of value to healthcare institutions. Now it will be key to understand the incremental vertical capabilities and their road map as Salesforce plans to build out the Health Cloud."
Analysis: EHR Integration Is Health Cloud's Top Job
Evidenced by the plethora of related partnership announcements for Health Cloud, the Salesforce ecosystem sees a sizable opportunity for it as well. For one, Health Cloud will leverage Philips HealthSuite platform for device connectivity, clinical data storage and analysis.
In addition, Health Cloud incorporates survey capabilities from GetFeedback and secure text messaging technology from TigerText. The latter gives healthcare workers a way to text in a HIPAA-compliant manner.
There are also five partners lined up to provide integration services between Health Cloud and EHR (electronic health record) systems: MuleSoft, Catalyze, Jitterbit, Apigee and Redox.
MuleSoft served as Salesforce's initial launch partner for Health Cloud when it was announced at Dreamforce in September. As Mulesoft said at the time:
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform for Salesforce Health Cloud marries the power of Anypoint Platform with a set of integration templates that seamlessly brings Epic Bridges and Epic Interconnect as well as HL7 v2, HL7 FHIR and SOAP data into Health Cloud. Built in partnership with our own customers, these templates provide pre-built data mappings, error handling and user security and authorization.
The fact that four more integration partners have already signed onto Health Cloud is a testament not only to the business opportunity, but technical challenges Health Cloud will face, particularly with customer implementations involving multiple back-end systems.
Healthcare IT has long been plagued by interoperability challenges, with a handful of large incumbent EHR vendors—Epic, Cerner and Meditech—holding a tight grip on vast stores of patient data. Those challenges won't evaporate overnight, although this week those companies and other health industry stakeholders took a public pledge to adopt standard APIs in the name of improving interoperability and data access.
Health Cloud's Sweet Spot
"The idea of the Health Cloud is to bring the ecosystem together—not to reinvent the wheel," says Constellation Research founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang. "So from device manufacturers to EHR systems, to physician practice, to insurers, the Health Cloud brings systems together and allows other services and capabilities to create new services on top. I'd think of the Health Cloud as an abstraction layer that allows customers to build on top of the existing investment."
In the end, if Salesforce is successful patients will win, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. "The medical records industry has focused on the records versus the patient," she says. "To improve patient relationships, software needs to provide a way to deliver high-quality patient care. The issue some people will have with all this data is the privacy aspect—so there's a trade off between having all this data available and getting better health care because all your health data is in one place."
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