4 DPA Use Cases for Healthcare Organizations using Salesforce

Patient engagement and experience are both critical components of improved health outcomes and increased profitability and revenue for providers. However, challenges exist when it comes to ways for providers to reach patients, improve operations, and bolster internal processes. 

Digital adoption is helping, but many providers cite new technology implementation and training as holding them back from spending more time with patients and realizing greater income. 

Salesforce Health Cloud isn’t looking to replace existing healthcare applications. Instead, it’s looking to provide a more consistent, cohesive, and friendly front end for the myriad of applications healthcare providers use today. In the process, Salesforce improves the efficiency of the provider’s operations and creates a better overall patient experience. 

However, understanding the struggle that providers face with technology puts Salesforce in a position to do even more for doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and others in the healthcare field. Combing the platform with digital process automation (DPA) features can simplify processes for staff and increase patient engagement while improving their experience.  

How? Here are just four of many, use cases that illustrate the value of Salesforce plus DPA for healthcare.  

4 Use Cases for DPA with Salesforce for Healthcare 

Increasing data accuracy with pre-filled patient information 

Manual entry of data within healthcare is a costly and potentially harmful problem. Research published by the National Institute of Health noted that “Even small data errors have measurable effects on a clinical organization's ability to accurately determine whether it is meeting its operational performance goals.” 

Not only is this a costly problem in the short term, but it can also have devastating effects on providers long term as well. Errors in patient data can put patients at risk and negatively affect how a patient views the competency of an entire provider’s office and damages the patient experience. 

This problem is easily remedied with DPA and Health Cloud. Patient forms can be auto-filled using existing, validated patient data and demographic information, minimizing the need for manual entry - reducing errors, increasing patient safety, and saving time for office staff. 

This information can be propagated to the multiple systems integrated with the Salesforce platform across a provider’s ecosystem. Further, error checking can be automated within forms to ensure that simple to-catch errors are flagged before data is saved to a patient’s file. 

Gathering patient feedback for pharmaceutical companies 

There was a time when patient engagement for pharmaceutical companies was minimal. Today, it’s become an integral part of drug development, testing, and enhancement. According to an article in the National Library of Medicine, “...providers who seek to develop better solutions, including medicines, must gain a deeper understanding of the patient experience. Beyond pathology, such understanding requires direct engagement with patients, something that has been historically avoided in the pharmaceutical industry.” 

Salesforce makes this engagement easier, and DPA streamlines the process. Within Salesforce, users can create feedback forms shared via email through Marketing Cloud to appropriate patients. Once completed and submitted, these forms can be stored and the results routed automatically to the appropriate pharma product manager or team for review. 

Using Care Gap to keep patients active in treatment plans 

While treatment plans are not rigid, they do tend to follow a similar flow. That’s one reason that Health Cloud is so powerful for providers - using a visual tool, provider teams can map out a treatment plan, including timelines and hooks into various communication methods like email and text. 

In the past, when a doctor set a patient on the path of a treatment plan, instructions were given for things like follow-ups or blood work to the patient. Until the next appointment, a doctor had no real way of tracking if a patient had followed through on the treatment directives. 

Care Gap and DPA change that. If, for instance, a doctor indicates that a patient should follow up with a cholesterol test in three months, the burden no longer sits with the patient to remember or the office staff to note the absence of a test. Instead, automation as part of the treatment plan would notify the doctor or office staff of the missed touchpoint so that the patient can be contacted. Going a step further, the platform could send out an email or text message to remind the patient that the blood test is due. 

Leveraging Assessments for aftercare monitoring 

Similar to treatment plans, aftercare following a procedure puts a lot on the shoulders of the patient. Occasionally, patients experience complications following a procedure but assume it’s part of the healing process or that the issue will resolve itself.  

However, to the expert eye of the clinician, the symptoms may be indicative of a more severe problem. If the patient doesn’t initiate contact, however, the provider may never know of the problem.  

Care Assessments within the Health Cloud can fill this gap. A survey can be sent regularly - daily, weekly, etc. - to a patient after a procedure. It may only include a few quick questions like pain level or functional ability. Upon filling out the survey, the results appear in the clinician’s dashboard for review. 

Beyond that, automation can ensure that these touchpoints are completed. Should a patient miss filling out an assessment, a staff member can place a call to follow up. If any of the assessment results fall outside of normal parameters, the clinician can be alerted that there may be a problem. In either case, the patient receives better care without adding a significant burden to them or the provider. 

Conclusion 

Healthcare providers need help from their technology, not another distraction from offering quality and value-driven care to patients. Salesforce Health Cloud provides many features that offer easier, faster solutions for providers and healthcare facilities. When combined with DPA processes, Salesforce resets a healthcare team’s focus on patients, not technology. 

Are you looking to add automation to your patient-facing and operational technology solutions? Six Consulting has deep experience with Salesforce, helping providers, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare organizations massively improve the patient experience and their bottom line. Contact us today to learn more about how Salesforce’s Health Cloud and automation can help your organization.