Salesforce Introduces Salesforce Health Cloud -- Building Patient Relationships, Not Records

Earlier this month Salesforce, the worlds leading customer relationship management company, introduced “Salesforce health cloud”. This health cloud will enable care coordinators to gain a complete understanding of their patients’ health through individual profiles, each profile containing a personal health timeline. A typical profile includes anything from current conditions and medications to upcoming appointments or test results. The most interesting part of this health cloud is that health information on ones profile can be populated from a variety of sources, including EMRs, medical devices, wearables and more.

Imagine, a doctor being able to access anything from his patients medical records and previous operations, to information about activity level being recorded on his patients’ Apple Watch. This IT will enable doctors to access need- to-know info about his patients instantly, making it much easier to make medical recommendations and decisions on their patients’ behalf.

I am convinced that this technology is the future of the patient to doctor relationship. When I say convinced I mean that there is literally no downside to this technology. One may argue that this is a dangerous idea, that what if some ones health cloud is hacked, putting potentially harmful health information into the wrong hands. Well, most people’s health information today is stored on computer software, so it already can be hacked. So, if you do happen to be someone so important that there are hackers willing to spend time and resources to get your records, they could get them, health cloud, or not.

I chose this article for the following reason. This past summer I broke my thumb, displacing a ligament in my hand, while playing lacrosse. I visited an orthopedic surgeon and was told that, in order for my thumb to heal properly, and to avoid a strong chance of developing arthritis at an early age, I would need to have surgery. Please, don’t worry about me, the surgery was a complete success and my thumb is totally healed.

But, post surgery I noticed that something was amiss. For some reason I kept receiving automated emails from the practice that performed the operation, requesting that I set up a “patient portal”. I probably would have never actually signed up, if I had come across this article, but I figured I might as well see what kind of competition Salesforce health cloud is up against. So I signed up and was disappointed to say the least. The portal had five tabs; home, messages, ask a question, prescriptions, and health forms. It almost looked as seamless as the final HTML project I did for CS last semester, but not quite. The interface was boring, slow, and hard to navigate. I spent ten minutes navigating before I felt an urge to throw my computer into next week. After this traumatic experience I now yearn for this health cloud. With that being said Salesforce may need to change its name to Healthforce.

Sources:

"Salesforce Introduces Salesforce Health Cloud -- Building Patient Relationships, Not Records." -- SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.