Salesforce aims for 'a panoramic view of the patient'
What with a fledgling developer program for wearables and reports that it is gunning to earn a cool $1 billion in annual revenue from the sector, it’s clear that Salesforce.com is setting sights on the healthcare realm.
And while cloud and enterprise application rivals including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will also be exhibiting at HIMSS15 in April, Salesforce senior vice president Todd Pierce is boldly claiming that the company offers something unique.
“We're bringing this panoramic view of the patient,” Pierce says. “We can bring data from any source. Being open cloud technology, we can aggregate data whether it's from devices or EMRs or other sources. Salesforce is really going to highlight how we can help all the different players in this new era with what we call our Customer Success Platform.”
That platform, which spans patient acquisition, care delivery, engagement and analytics, consists of software-as-a-service offerings for marketing, sales, service, and a community option that enables patients to share information with caregivers, be those clinicians or family members.
The newest piece, Wave, is an analytics platform. TriCore Reference Laboratories is one of the pilot customers.
“They're trying to differentiate themselves and provide more intelligence by becoming a recommendation engine for physicians,” Pierce explains. “Whenever they order tests, they can recommend other relevant tests. And then they do analytics on the results to help physicians make more accurate diagnoses and act on them.”
Salesforce also has high-profile partnerships with Philips, Optum, and GE, Pierce adds.
Philips' Hospital to Home initiative, for instance, involves giving patients a special packet of Philips monitors that use Salesforce cloud services so that patients and doctors can share information and caregivers can monitor many people simultaneously in a way that Pierce describes as taking “the complexity out of interacting with disparate devices.”
Speaking of devices, Pierce says that because Salesforce is cloud-based and has open APIs, more than 80 devices have already been integrated into its services.
But all of this is not to suggest that Salesforce is entirely new to healthcare. Pierce points to customers including CNS Response, which maintains a database that helps physicians track how patients responds to SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and Health Leads, a company that enables clinicians to prescribe social services for basic needs.
“We've actually been helping early adopters — innovators in the healthcare field — for the better part of ten years,” he says.
Salesforce will be at Booth 7535, in the North Hall of Chicago’s McCormick Place during HIMSS15 and Pierce says it will also be holding customer meetings and lounges at the office it maintains within walking distance of the convention center.
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