At Silverline, we have a unique perspective on building solutions for the Healthcare industry. Our industry vertical focus allows us to leverage our experience working with clients on projects to help understand use cases and requirements that can apply to other clients with similar needs.
And although our main focus is around providing Advisory, Implementation, and ongoing Managed Services to our customers, we are a company who also produces products for the Salesforce AppExchange, and so we get a lot of exposure to non-Services clients who use our products in a variety of ways. Often, they reach out to us to request additions to the product roadmap in order to meet their specific, industry use case needs.
I’d like to talk about one example where a Medical Device customer of ours working with our CalendarAnything product had just such a request and how we evolved our product to support their use case.
CalendarAnything is a powerful and highly configurable tool that can visualize any data in Salesforce and present the records on a variety of Calendar Views including Day, Week, Month, Gantt, Agenda, and Swimlane. You can apply conditional color coding and drag events around to change their dates and times—and in the case of “grouping” modes like Swimlane, easily reassign by dragging between columns. We make CalendarAnything available on the desktop and also as a component that can be used in the Salesforce mobile app.
Our Medical Device company came to us with a request. They have over 1,000 users broken down into small teams comprised of both sales and clinical resources. These teams are responsible for scheduling coverage for procedures at hospitals and surgical centers where their medical devices are being used so that they can have representation either in person or on call.
The users are mostly mobile and the schedules change frequently and they needed an easy way to determine who on a team might be available to cover a particular procedure and to easily assign or reassign these procedures to the appropriate team member. And this needed to be done on mobile devices including phones and tablets.
We had actually heard a similar use case before from another Medical Device customer that we had worked with. In fact, our “Swimlane View” in CalendarAnything had been created specifically for that use case, so we had a pretty good understanding of what was required. However, we hadn’t brought that capability to the mobile device due to limitations of the smaller form factor. But we did have some ideas and worked closely with this new client to propose ways in which we could provide them with a solution that they could use.
We wound up enhancing our mobile application to add a new mode that could display a Day at a time, broken down into scrollable columns showing the schedule for each member of the team in a separate column – our “Day Grouping” mode. We actually expanded the desktop version of CalendarAnything to include this new mode as well and leveraged the existing mechanisms we had put in place to define “groups”. You could access User List Views or Custom Grouping approaches that could be defined by an Admin in Salesforce.
While these approaches provided a good amount of flexibility and worked, it required the client to maintain a whole new grouping approach which represented extra initial work and ongoing maintenance. So we consulted with the client and figured out a way to leverage the existing Public Group capability in Salesforce as an alternate way to select a group of users and see their schedules.
Over the coming weeks, we will be working with this client to roll out this new functionality while gathering feedback from the teams actually working with the solution in the field. At the same time, we are beginning to think about others ways we can leverage the power of the Salesforce platform to proactively recommend additional ways Medical Device companies like this can make this type of process more efficient. For example, can we integrate scheduling information into Salesforce and possibly use Einstein Artificial Intelligence to predict the need for coverage and propose appropriate team coverage based on availability and expertise.
If you or your organization have a similar need and are interested in learning how we may be able to assist, you can contact us here.