With every Salesforce release, there is a flurry of conversations that happen in the community around the changes and their implications to the platform. As we read through many of these, we noticed that Salesforce Health Cloud didn’t receive as much attention, even though the changes made are providing significant wins in the industry. We’re going to unpack the release notes (which you can read here) and discuss what these changes mean.
To provide context, I spoke with Krishna Tatta, our Technical Architect Team Lead. She is helping our largest Healthcare clients take full advantage of the capabilities and benefits Health Cloud has to offer.
She summarized the release like this:
“The core focus of the updates in Health Cloud are tied to connecting payers and providers, which ultimately improves patient experience by having claims, questions, and care being aggregated in one place and having that data funneled in a centralized way.”
Utilization Management and Health Insurance Data Models
The first two sections in the release focus on Utilization Management and Health Insurance Data Models. These two go hand in hand and can be thought of this way — utilization management is the process and efficient exposure of the data, while the data models provide a clean structure for capturing data that supports the process.
Utilization management is the practice of evaluating the treatment options of a patient on a case-by-case basis to help manage cost while still providing the best care.
With the support of utilization management within the system, payers and providers can collaborate and share the status of cases and the patients’ related benefits. This new functionality is achieved through the new health insurance data models (which are powered by the new objects and components mentioned at the end of the release notes).
Easier Access Between External Systems and Health Cloud
The ability for external systems to pass and display claims data or claims information in Health Cloud is another major enhancement for providers and payers to collaborate. Payers use external systems to process claims data, which previously meant working in multiple applications. This enhancement allows you to surface the data into other external systems and in turn provides the infrastructure for Health Cloud to display the data in Salesforce and integrate it into relevant workflows.
Improved UX and Support for Patient Card
In Health Cloud, the Patient Card is a snapshot view of the patient, which made it easy for users to quickly understand what was happening with the patient with links to other relevant data. Previously, if you clicked any of those links, it navigated you away from the patient card in a new window, which many users found frustrating. This improvement allows you to open the relevant information in a subtab, which enables you to keep the patient card in view.
Security is Still Forefront
Salesforce and Health Cloud are well respected in the industry for keeping personal health information (PHI) secure and HIPAA compliant. With this release, Salesforce allows many of the fields within Health Cloud to be encrypted (see a full list of the fields here).
Are you thinking of building on Health Cloud or are not sure your app is taking full advantage of its features? Get in touch — we’re happy to chat. To learn more about how we’ve helped others succeed on Health Cloud, check out our Health Cloud Success Stories here!
