On October 27, 2016, CBS premiered Pure Genius, a prime time show about the fictitious Bunker Hill Hospital—a hospital founded by Silicon Valley billionaire James Bell where medicine and technology converge. Together with a team of doctors who refuse to stop when conventional treatments fail and tech geniuses with wildly creative minds, Bell turns medicine upside down to find cures for some of the sickest patients. Even though such a hospital is still a thing of the future, technology plays an integral role in today’s medicine. And now, it is helping to return medicine to a more patient-centric model.
In the United States, nonprofits play an important role in health care: offering care to the uninsured and underinsured, improving access to mental health care, providing resources to those with chronic illness and funding for research to study diseases like cancer, mitochondrial disease, Alzheimer’s and more. These organizations do not have to be left behind just because technology can seem expensive at first glance.
With the Spring ‘17 release, Salesforce offers a lot of great new features that can impact the health care nonprofit. Let’s take a look at some of the best new features to look out for:
Easily track patients that are at highest risk with Risk Stratification
When you are responsible for tending to the health of hundreds of patients with different healthcare needs, it can be hard to track which patients need a follow-up call, or a little extra help from the team’s pharmacist or social worker. In the Spring ’17 release, Salesforce introduces Risk Stratification to the Health Cloud, making it easier to report on the patients who could use a little extra care. The Risk Stratification component is set up based on the CMS HCC risk model, but it can be customized by your Salesforce team to meet your specific risk stratification criteria.
With an increasing number of patients struggling with chronic conditions that are often treated with behavioral modifications like diet changes, having a risk stratification within Health Cloud makes it easier to follow up with patients before their condition worsens. As a medical professional, this gives you the ability to provide individualized care, even when you have hundreds of patients to tend to, by being able to easily pull reports of patients who fit certain criteria. Taking it one step further, for those who have the appropriate PHI credentials, there is an option to use Wave to take this information and turn it into dashboards, charts and lists that let you visually see all of the health of all of your patients.
Let Patient Care Coordinators Get Technical with Their Patient Segments
Take your ability to find certain patients to a whole new level with the addition of Boolean logic to the filtering of patient lists. The next time you want to report on the patients within your clinic who have both a form of dysautonamia and a connective tissue disease, you can enter multiple ICD 10 codes for each condition, using an ‘OR’ to retrieve all of the folks who have a form of dysautonamia and an ‘AND’ for joining that information with anyone who has a diagnosis code correlating with connective tissue disease.
Using Boolean logic, you can now take those filters and say (1 OR 2) AND (3 OR 4) to find patients with these comorbid conditions right in your patient lists, rather than having to use a report to get this information.
So the next time you want to send a mailing about an upcoming seminar targeted at this group, or follow up with them to ensure medication compliance, assign them to a specific case worker at the clinic, set a reminder when they come in for a follow-up and include an appointment with the pharmacist, and more, you can use Boolean logic to narrow in on your target group faster and more effectively. Another time-saving win that makes it easier to care for your patients!
Convert Leads to Patients Simply
Does your organization get referrals from other social service agencies? Does the ER send you individuals who need better access to appropriate care to manage a chronic condition? Do you run a chronic illness care program that receives referrals from primary care doctors or specialists? The names of these potential patients may end up in your database for follow-up, but they are not yet a patient. Now, patient care coordinators can seamlessly convert these leads into patients in Salesforce, automatically creating all of the records needed so that you can track your new patients without any excess data entry. Why waste time on entering data when there are patients who need you?
Spring ‘17 is another major improvement for nonprofit users. Check out a few other key features like upgrades to email integration for Gmail or Outlook, dozens of upgrades to Lightning making it more and more nonprofit friendly, and for those with existing orgs, the updates that have been made to the Lightning Readiness Check. Are you thinking about moving to Lightning, wondering what it would take, well step over to the Readiness Check and take a peek. Still not comfortable? Talk to your favorite consultants to discuss a plan for implementing the Nonprofit Success Pack, Lightning, Health Cloud, or any of the other great features offered to nonprofits by Salesforce.
466 pages of release notes? How about 35 minutes with our experts?
Listen to our Salesforce Spring '17 webinar recording from February 8, 2017 to learn the features and updates Salesforce has in store.
