Salesforce has unveiled a new cloud based system aimed at helping clinicians to build stronger relationships with patients. The launch comes in the same week that UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.
Salesforce Health Cloud (SHC) is a cloud-based patient relationship manager that aims to give health service providers a more complete picture of each patient, by integrating data from electronic medical records, wearables and other sources, such as general practitioner and hospital notes.
The service was developed in the US, where recent legislation – such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – aims to put more emphasis on improving the patient experience. According to Salesforce, wearable technology has changed the way health services are administered and new cloud apps must cater for the new expectations of patients. The SHC is designed to meet the demands of a generation of digital natives that grew up with iPhones, Facebook and FitBits who expect to use technology to manage their care. According to Salesforce’s research, 71 per cent of ‘millennials’ (those reaching adulthood around the year 2000) want their doctors to provide a mobile app to actively manage their health. Salesforce claims that 63 per cent of them want health data extracted from their wearables to be available to their doctors.
The Health Cloud was developed with input from a variety of US-based healthcare companies, including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center, Philips and the University of California and San Francisco. Development partners included Accenture, Deloitte Digital, PwC, MuleSoft and Persistent Systems, who collectively integrated records and customised content.
Features include a Patient Caregiver Map, which can map household relationships, as well as all providers and specialists involved in a patient’s care. A ‘Today’ screen alerts caregivers to timely issues, such as missed appointments or the need to refill medications. The logic of the system is that fewer patients will fall through the cracks in any health service, an issue that Salesforce Chatter – an internal social networking tool – aims to combat through a review process for internal health service conversations.
“The era of precision healthcare is upon us,” said Joshua Newman, Chief Medical Officer for Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences.