Salesforce Data Cloud for Healthcare and Life Sciences | Benefits and Use Case on Operational Efficiency

Salesforce Data Cloud harmonizes and unifies data, breaking down data silos so that organizations can collaborate across teams with their data and make better use of them for personalized customer experiences and interactions. In healthcare, this can be extremely useful and critical to ensure patient care and operational efficiency are precise, personalized, and consistently optimized for the best possible outcomes. This integration allows healthcare providers to deliver tailored treatment plans, swiftly respond to patient needs, and enhance overall service quality, ultimately leading to improved patient satisfaction, health outcomes and reduced costs.

Top 5 Benefits of Salesforce Data Cloud for Operational Efficiency

1. Optimized Resource Management

Salesforce Data Cloud can enable healthcare organizations to efficiently manage staff schedules, bed occupancy, and inventory levels. This optimization reduces waste and ensures that resources are available when needed, thereby enhancing operational workflows and cost-effectiveness​.

2. Enhanced Decision-Making

By integrating BI & AI tools, the unified data management system enabled by Data Cloud can deliver real-time analytics. This empowers healthcare providers to make informed decisions quickly. This improved decision-making capability enhances response times and overall operational efficiency, ensuring timely patient care​.

3. Cost Reduction

By leveraging cloud solutions, healthcare organizations can significantly reduce IT infrastructure costs. Cloud platforms eliminate the need for on-premises servers and reduce maintenance expenses, translating into substantial cost savings​.

4. Streamlined Administrative Tasks

Automation in a data cloud works by leveraging centralized data management, real-time data processing, and AI integration. Automated data workflows reduce manual data entry and ensure consistent updates across systems & departments through data sharing. AI and machine learning tools analyze large datasets to identify patterns, predict outcomes, and automate complex analytical tasks. Administrative and clinical workflows, such as scheduling and billing, are streamlined, freeing up staff to focus on patient care. This automation enhances efficiency and improves coordination among healthcare teams​.

5. Improved Collaboration

Data Cloud unifies data and allows healthcare providers, researchers, and administrators to access and share patient information in real-time, leading to coordinated care and more informed decision-making. Enhanced data sharing supports collaborative research (eg: anonymized patient histories to aid research) and accelerates the development of treatments, improving patient outcomes.

Use Case Example

Let’s demonstrate with an example of a healthcare organization, BetterHealth&Beyond Hospital where they implemented Data Cloud to enhance operational efficiency.

BetterHealth&Beyond (BHB) Hospital had both manual and semi-automated processes in place for data management. Let’s look at a few instances of how their systems work. 

• Typically, their supply chain is managed through a software that helps manage order status, inventory, distribution etc. 
• The healthcare support staff have a data management system in place to view patient bio, health condition and medicines or care to be provided. 
• The doctor on call would do the rounds, examine the patient and update the  bedside chart and these entries would then be typed out for the patient by the nurses.
• The accounts & finance team would receive information by phone that a patient is ready for discharge. They would then prepare the invoices based on the reports shared by the healthcare team and from reports shared by the pharmacy & stores for medical and surgical equipment consumption.

Concerns:

• Errors & misinterpretations arising from manual entries while feeding in information.
• Time spent on coordination, sharing data, manual entries and delivering patient care.
• Lack of collaboration and repetition of effort between teams while sharing data about a single patient
• Data silos created by lack of integration between third party systems and hospital systems 
• Data privacy and security of sensitive patient information
• Inconsistent reporting

Salesforce Data Cloud Solutions

1. Patient Care:

• Fragmented Data Access and Manual Data Entry: Salesforce Data Cloud breaks data silos as it ingests data from disparate sources, both structured and semi-structured, harmonizes and unifies this data to manage patient profiles. These profiles are used to store and manage patient bio, health conditions, and care instructions in one place. This ensures that all relevant data is easily accessible and consistently updated and available for use across departments with access controls that ensure privacy and security.
• Real-time data entry and synchronization features of Data Cloud solutions, allowed doctors to update patient records digitally during rounds. This reduces transcription errors and ensures immediate availability of updated information.

2. Communication and Collaboration:

• Communication and collaboration tools integrated with Data Cloud enabled real-time, secure messaging and data sharing between healthcare teams, finance, and pharmacy departments, drastically reducing time and costs

3. Supply Chain Management:

• Integrated Platform: Salesforce Data Cloud provides an integrated platform that can connect supply chain management with other hospital systems. This ensures real-time updates and data accuracy across order status, inventory, and distribution.
• Real-time Inventory Management: Automated tracking and updates in real-time can help manage stock levels efficiently, preventing stockouts and overstocking issues.
• Predictive Analytics: Utilizing Salesforce's predictive analytics can forecast demand for medical supplies, optimizing inventory levels and reducing waste.

4. Compliance

• Data Cloud ensures robust data security and compliance by utilizing built-in encryption, access controls, and regular audits. This protects sensitive patient information and ensures compliance with regulations like HIPAA.

By leveraging Data Cloud solutions, BetterHealth&Beyond Hospital enhanced operational efficiency, improved patient care, and streamlined internal communication and data management processes, addressing all the typical concerns and challenges of their existing system.

Once data is unified, Data Cloud integrated with BI and AI apps and tools to deliver complex analytics, reporting and even predictive analytics. These reports are useful for decision makers and top management to improve the operational efficiency of the hospital.