Improve remote patient services delivery with CRM

These days professional Healthcare delivery is shifting more and more towards Virtual care. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems like Salesforce for Healthcare is used primarily to pull patient data from various Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and provide a single 360-degree view of patients. This improves visibility and efficiencies for Care teams who engages with patients in their health journey to provide better outcomes.

How Virtual Care reducing access gaps

With onset of Covid-19 pandemic more and more households with internet access are interested in remote care which can take place online or on the phone. This is leading to fundamental shift from traditional patient care to virtual visits which can takes place between patients and clinicians in real time virtually from any location. Salesforce Health cloud enables providers with framework to connect with patients remotely and schedule check-ins. Care teams, providers and payers can combine patients’ clinical data (vitals) and non-clinical data (demographic) to provide a complete view of patient’s medical history, care plans, timelines. This can help identify potential health risks, personalize engagements, and recommend next best actions for patients.

Understanding Interoperability for Patients, Hospitals and Clinicians

According to a study, on average hospitals use 16 disparate EHR systems. They also have other systems like insurance claims, labs reports, billing systems, etc. Salesforce can connect these systems using HL7 or FHIR APIs through integration platforms like MuleSoft which can use the pre-built connectors for healthcare, thereby solving interoperability challenges like gathering and exchanging patient information. Some of the critical use cases can be Provider system queries state registry EHR system for patient vaccine history and forecast.  Patient vaccine Information is sent to State registry EHR system after vaccine is administered  Billing information is sent from Provider systems to Billing Clearinghouse EHR systems like MedSphere, eClinicalWorks etc.

Overcoming the technical challenge

The providers need to maintain data ‘liquidity’, which means the patient data should be available to stakeholders. If the data is not liquid the practice can be labelled as ‘data blocker’ and face penalties under Cures Act. Integration Platforms like MuleSoft and standards like HL7 and FHIR help to overcome the interoperability challenges to connect providers real-time or batch integration to other healthcare stakeholders. By overcoming these challenges, we can meet the changing needs of the healthcare industry like patient demand for immediate access to their healthcare records, doctors need to access their patients portals on their mobile phones, and supply providers a360-degree views of their patient data to get better insights.

Conclusion

Demand for virtual care is growing as this is very convenient and avoids the travel time and expense for patients. It opens another delivery channel to existing traditional in-person visits which eliminates many social factors that affect care outcomes in underserved communities. For hospitals it is improving patient satisfaction rate and patient relationship with their providers. If interested in learning more about Virtual Healthcare or help in implementation of Salesforce health cloud or integration with EHR systems,