Salesforce Health Cloud introduced a suite of new technologies this past week designed for remote patient monitoring, connected health, medication management and more.

WHY IT MATTERS

Salesforce says it designed new features to help providers streamline operations and achieve better health outcomes as well as meet patients where they are – at home, at work or on the go.

They include a tool called Remote Patient Exception Monitoring, designed to enable the remote collection of patient physical data, such as vital signs, without having to bring patients into the office. It allows providers to set target metrics for patients, charting a course of engagement in real time with connected medical devices, and to connect with patients from a single dashboard. 

Salesforce's Intelligent Appointment Management is meant to help patients schedule appointments on their computers or mobile devices. By choosing a call center option, the scheduler is able to initiate available appointment slots in real time for the patient to choose from. Pre-visit questionnaires can also be sent to the patient to streamline the check-in process for patients.

Its medication-management tool offers a consolidated list of patient medications for pharmacists, clinicians and other providers to view and manage. The tool also integrates with RxNorm to link clinical drug vocabularies across multiple pharmacy management and drug interaction platforms.

Meanwhile, the company says expanded HIPAA compliance in Salesforce Maps can help home patient-care providers to plan their visits, optimize their schedules and review patient data. When placing orders for medicine, home health products and more, caregivers can set permissions around certain pieces of patient information on a need-to-know basis with suppliers and distributors.

THE LARGER TREND

More care-at-home options, the desire to have care delivery in nontraditional settings and the COVID-19 pandemic are driving healthcare innovations.  

With half the U.S. population being managed for chronic diseases, RPM is an innovation that can reduce healthcare costs with more timely and efficient care. 

Sarah Carroll, senior director of the Center for Care Transformation at AVIA, who spoke with Healthcare IT News recently, said that the most advanced health systems recognize population trends and are implementing remote patient monitoring to address chronic care and support the Triple Aim. 

With hospital care driving high costs in healthcare, obtaining patient-reported and biometric data remotely can reduce avoidable hospital visits, delay disease progression and lower treatment costs. 

To reduce administrative costs and missed appointments, innovations that ease the process of making appointments and streamline patient information, like medication and unique health requirements, have the potential to achieve greater healthcare affordability and better patient experiences and outcomes. 

ON THE RECORD

"For years, the healthcare system has struggled to catch up with the innovation we were seeing across other industries," said Kevin Riley, SVP and general manager of healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce. "But the pandemic forced us to accelerate digital transformation and provide the healthcare system with digital-first and always-on patient-focused solutions."

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.