The 1 Product that Transforms Your EHR into a Comprehensive Healthcare Solution

Imagine a person who decided to plan their life according to the documents in their possession. Insurance forms, bank statements,

3 min. read

Imagine a person who decided to plan their life according to the documents in their possession. Insurance forms, bank statements, diplomas, marriage licenses, medical records — what if this individual only consulted this information before planning each day? You’d probably call this person odd, right? You’d argue that these records don’t summarize every aspect of a life, and so by focusing on them, one might miss the bigger picture.

Well, if you’re a healthcare provider, you could make the same argument about managing your practice solely via an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) or Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

EMR/EHRs have revolutionized the healthcare industry by enhancing the portability and security of healthcare documents, but they weren’t expressly designed to run your entire business. They’re so focused on the minutiae of patient care that they aren’t optimized to provide a broad view of your patient lifecycle or others aspects of your business.

So if your practice is looking to grow by understanding its entire business from intake to post-care and billing, your EMR/EHR might fall short. Salesforce Health Cloud, however, can offer this kind of visibility. Specifically, Health Cloud allows providers to deliver higher quality care by enabling them to accomplish these 3 goals:

3 Ways Salesforce Health Cloud Helps Deliver Higher Quality Care

1. Think in care plans, not records.

Your EMR/EHR is excellent at the what and when of patient care, but Salesforce Health Cloud provides more of the how. It leaves your detailed records about procedures, results, immunizations, et cetera in your EMR/EHR and instead relies on care plans that focus on curing or managing overarching problems a patient faces (hypertension, diabetes, arthritis). Your team can develop goals (“lower blood pressure to < 130 / 85”) and subtasks (“Buy low-sodium replacements for common snacks,” “Join an aerobics class”) to address each problem, transforming complex lab numbers into understandable action points. In this way, Health Cloud frames each patient as an individual with unique objectives and challenges, not as a collection of records with a set of diagnoses.

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2. Collaborate with providers outside of your practice.

Remember the days when a single doctor could treat your ear infection, toothache and appendicitis, all in one visit (usually with leeches)? Me neither. The vast majority of your patients engage with a myriad of other care providers on a regular basis: Primary care providers (PCPs), other specialty practitioners, nursing homes, even family members. But some EMR/EHRs can’t grant access to providers outside of your organization, making it difficult for your patients to receive consistent care.

Enter Health Cloud. It can leverage the functionality of Salesforce Community Cloud to grant special login access to these other providers or even patients. They can not only see the care plans you develop but also mark goals and tasks complete.

A patient’s healthcare is almost never in the hands of one provider or practice. So shouldn’t your technology reflect that cooperative approach to wellness?

3. Understand how the full patient lifecycle fits with the rest of your business.

The healthcare ecosystem involves much more than direct patient care, and your technology should too. Health Cloud allows you to understand each patient’s entire lifecycle within your practice, from intake to post-care. So it enables you to understand your business in ways an EMR/EHR can’t. For example, you can analyze your referrals to see which PCPs are recommending you for which procedures, to identify opportunities to educate them on other services you provide.

It also lets you connect with other Salesforce products so that your patient tracking capabilities lie on the same platform as your marketing team, call center and billing department. So with Salesforce, you can see the connection points in your business in a new light.

But it’s important to note that Health Cloud wasn’t designed to replace your current EMR/EHR system; they’re cooperative solutions, not competitive ones. It instead integrates with your EMR/EHR so that you can see patient data — encounters, procedures, immunizations — within the same platform as the above features. In combining EMR/EHR records with the best features of Salesforce, Health Cloud provides a 360-degree view of your patient base and broader business, allowing you to identify growth opportunities in a way your current technology may not support.

Interested in concrete ways of tracking your business more comprehensively? Check out our checklist of Health Cloud solutions for tips that solve common technology pain points for providers. Or get more healthcare resources here.

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AUTHOR

Danielle Sutton