The healthcare and life sciences industry faces a unique set of challenges when it comes to balancing customer needs with the realities of doing business in today’s world.
Macroeconomic conditions like inflation, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and sustainability concerns have disrupted the status quo for this industry. In order to navigate this complex environment, organizations need to adopt tools and technologies that allow them to do more with less.
This is where Salesforce Health Cloud comes into play.
Benefits of Salesforce Health Cloud Integration
The platform is designed to enhance the patient experience, drive cost reductions, and elevate the quality of care within healthcare organizations. Multiple success stories of implementing Salesforce CRM for healthcare demonstrate the value and benefits:
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- Efficient patient outreach: Salesforce leverages marketing automation to reach suitable patients at scale, allowing healthcare solutions to go to market faster.
- Streamlined operations: Salesforce’s customizable interface and automation solutions reduce the data entry burden for healthcare providers, enabling them to focus more on patient care.
- Data security compliance: Salesforce ensures compliance with critical data security standards, including HIPAA, offering secure access to essential patient data. The platform invests in infrastructure to meet regulatory requirements, supporting healthcare institutions, especially during challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Seamless integrations: Salesforce’s robust APIs facilitate seamless integrations with existing systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), bringing together patient data from various sources onto a single platform for simplified and streamlined data management.
- 360-degree patient perspective: Salesforce Patient Management Software provides a comprehensive view of patients, allowing healthcare providers to support a rich patient experience with safe, connected, and intelligent health apps, promoting individualized patient experiences and real-time communication.
Despite the promise of a higher ROI, Implementing Salesforce Health Cloud can present challenges, particularly for healthcare organizations that are new to cloud computing or have limited experience with Salesforce.
Navigating the implementation process successfully requires careful consideration and expertise in leveraging cloud technology and Salesforce functionalities.
Common Challenges in Health Cloud Implementation
Below are the most common hurdles healthcare institutions face when implementing Salesforce Health Cloud.
Attempting to Replicate the Old System in the Health Cloud
When implementing a platform like Salesforce, it’s an opportunity to redefine your approach to technology and patient experience. However, many companies make the mistake of expecting Salesforce to merely replicate their previous solutions. This overlooks the chance to address outdated practices and workaround processes.
While there may be aspects you appreciate in your previous system, embracing Salesforce Health Cloud should involve more than a direct swap.
It’s crucial to consider the issues that prompted the shift to Salesforce initially and leverage its unique capabilities to address them.
“Take the time to analyze your processes thoroughly beforehand. Avoid the temptation to add unnecessary custom blocks or functionalities that may not directly contribute to your objectives. By keeping the system streamlined and focused on essential tasks, you can optimize performance, enhance productivity, and ensure a more seamless user experience for your team,” says Ellie Yantsen, the Head of Marketing & Client Experience at Twistellar, Salesforce Consulting, and Implementation Partner.
Failure to Define a Future State for Health Cloud
Salesforce implementation opens doors to capturing and utilizing more data throughout the organization.
To maximize this data effectively, it’s vital to think beyond initial use cases and envision a long-term strategy.
For instance, if your initial use involves patient engagement, consider the potential expansion to physician outreach and management in the future.
Your Health Cloud solution should accommodate current needs while providing room for expansion, encompassing additional users, features, and integrations.
Lack of Change Management
Change management is often the linchpin in successful technology projects.
Implementing Salesforce Health Cloud without a change management plan can result in low adoption rates, confusion among stakeholders and users, increased risks, and delays.
A formalized change management process ensures a smooth onboarding and adoption of the new tool, forcing you to map out the journey from your current state to the desired future state.
Neglecting Post-Deployment Planning
Implementing Salesforce is an ongoing commitment that requires regular updates, maintenance, and adaptation to new use cases.
Planning for post-deployment resources is essential to avoid reacting to constant fires caused by user complaints or broken workflows.
A reliable Salesforce implementation partner will set the stage for ongoing success, enabling you to manage day-to-day operations without straining company resources.
Over-Customization Pitfalls
While Salesforce offers extensive customization options, it’s crucial to strike a balance. Over-customization can needlessly complicate your Salesforce org and create issues during implementation and beyond. Complexity increases the risk of breaking workflows, triggers, and dependencies during future updates.
Over-customization also hampers the onboarding process for new admins and developers, especially if customizations lack proper documentation.
This practice can lead to technical debt accumulation, impacting performance, prolonging development times, and complicating change projects. Ideally, leveraging out-of-the-box Health Cloud features whenever possible and resorting to custom code only when necessary ensures a more efficient and sustainable implementation.
To Wrap Up
As organizations embark on their Salesforce Health Cloud journey, addressing these challenges head-on is crucial. Success lies not just in adopting a powerful platform but in navigating the implementation with strategic precision, ensuring a future-ready, patient-centric healthcare experience.
By leveraging the capabilities of Salesforce Health Cloud, healthcare organizations can overcome implementation challenges and unlock the full potential of their data.