Yes, Salesforce continually rolls out new functionality and has a strategic business model that resulted in Forbes naming them the most innovative company four years in a row, but that is only part of the story. Salesforce also recognizes the value of branding, and this recent switch is strongly tied to its desire to move into additional industries.
This is why I am so excited.
Healthcare, like many industries, struggles to categorize Salesforce as anything more than a CRM system. The ability to get Healthcare organizations to buy into Salesforce requires a whole lot of convincing, such as why the Cloud, whether Salesforce is even a platform, and why Salesforce may be the right platform. If you are able to get through those obstacles, then you have the opportunity to explain the intricacies of a solution that could deliver on transforming Healthcare for a particular organization and reinforcing their vision.
A new brand was necessary to facilitate changing perceptions and to solidify Salesforce’s foothold in new markets.
There were a number of articles posted over the past few days that outlined how Salesforce was making a targeted entry into Healthcare. Although this is absolutely true (Salesforce is targeting a more vertical approach), the reality is, Salesforce has been operating in Healthcare for quite some time. Our client, Tim Pletcher, the Executive Director of the Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) succinctly outlines this concept in a recent article entitled “A newly aggressive Salesforce invades the health IT battlefield” on modernhealthcare.com. Further, Tim highlights that “Anyone who has recently formed an ACO and has a spreadsheet and is trying to figure out which doctor is in the club, and is trying to keep that spreadsheet up to date, they’re going to go quickly to Salesforce,” Pletcher said. “There are no tools within the walls of a healthcare organization that do that well. Even care-coordination applications, there is no market leader. That space is primed for a mature tool that is good at that stuff, relationship management.”
Silverline’s partnership with MiHIN to deliver a solution represents a microcosm of the capabilities of the platform, the need for managing complex relationships between patients, providers, and the institutions that deliver care. Salesforce will serve as the backbone to fundamentally change the way care is delivered in the State with some of the tangential initiatives on the radar. It is often overlooked that Salesforce is also incredibly good at being the lynch-pin between systems, automating business process or workflows, and providing a backbone to facilitate communities or portals to internal/external customers, to name a few.
The issue, as has always been, remains in educating the Healthcare community on the possibilities. To capitalize on these opportunities, and at the risk of oversimplifying, the following is messaging that Silverline believes is particularly effective:
Salesforce has historically always been about the customer. Healthcare is now all about the patient. Now that the patient is the customer, Salesforce is uniquely positioned as the platform to drive transformative change in Healthcare.
This is one of the reasons we are optimistic. We are also optimistic because of the item I mentioned earlier – Salesforce truly is an innovative company.
Their recent release of Wave, an analytics tool, has a wide array of applications within the Healthcare space with regards to population health, outcomes reporting, disease management, and other data points that seek to drive behavioral changes. Further, new functionality with their mobile platform provides greater real-time access to information with enhanced collaboration and new service cloud offerings opens the door to embedding wearables and other medical devices into established processes. Such offerings will continue to provide the tools for H organizations to promote their competitive advantage and deliver a higher quality of care.
If Salesforce remains dedicated to driving the right messaging into Healthcare and continuing to push the limits with its cloud platform, there is no reason why the Salesforce community can’t continue delivering innovative, and unique solutions, that solidify its penetration into the multi-billion dollar Healthcare delivery market.
Learn more about our Salesforce healthcare solutions.
