A patient support network isn’t made up of just doctors or nurses. Through contracting with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, VMS BioMarketing provides clinical educator solutions focused on empowering healthcare providers and patients through product support, education, and training. VMS BioMarketing strives to make real, personal connections that help patients engage in their treatment regimen.

This kind of patient-centered approach isn’t easy. Yet, VMS leads the clinical educator market in patient confidence to start and maintain therapy. As a leader in this market, VMS seeks constant improvement to their patient and healthcare provider experiences.

VMS biopharma clients expect them to move quickly — and to do so, the company saw an opportunity to streamline processes, drive efficiencies, and make it more seamless for its team to work together. 

Renee Brochhagen, VMS BioMarketing’s Chief Information Officer, was determined to:

• Decrease the time to onboard new clients
• Improve efficiency and workforce utilization of technology
• Automate and eliminate redundant or administrative tasks
• Better measure and monitor the company’s effectiveness

The answer to all this? Salesforce Health Cloud.

The Challenge: Driving time-saving efficiencies across the organization

Like any small company with continued growth, VMS started with an in-house, custom developed CRM tool and later looked at utilizing a packaged CRM solution to meet their clients’ and business needs. To get to the next level, VMS needed a flexible and scalable solution that would endure over time. 

“Our custom system was built in 2003,” said Brochhagen. “Being able to configure a client and get them up and running in a shorter period of time was key. Our clients want to experiment, test things out, and with our current configuration, we couldn’t do that easily.”

VMS solutions are completely customer-driven, so no two client programs are exactly the same. This complexity poses a challenge. Every time VMS began a contract with a new customer, tailoring the program journey to a customer’s non-standard requirements would require new development or integration, elongating the launch timeline.  

It wasn’t scalable anymore, and it took significant amounts of time and effort — nearly 200 development hours for each new program. And that was if everything went right!

On top of that, their 100 full-time users varied wildly in terms of tech savviness and jobs to be done, from customer support reps looking for a way to quickly troubleshoot issues to telephonic nurse educators providing personalized, high-touch engagements with patients directly. With two systems to learn, it took time to onboard new employees, and often created time lags as different teams used the systems differently.

For their technology to work, VMS needed a solution that was flexible, customizable, and nimble— so new clients could get up to speed quickly, and so anyone in the organization could see at-a-glance what a client needed. “We knew this was a huge transformation for our organization, so we needed an implementation partner who could help us get up and running fast and who can teach us those best practices based on their experience,” said Brochhagen. “That’s Silverline.”

The Solution: Salesforce Health Cloud

The healthcare landscape is constantly evolving toward more personalized care, valuable internal and external collaboration, data-driven business decisions, and the elimination of paper processes. Health Cloud is at the forefront of this movement, and Silverline’s deep experience in implementing services like this one meant they could adapt it to VMS BioMarketing’s complex set of needs.

Working collaboratively and in real time

Brochhagen brought together her entire team for this implementation to work side-by-side with Silverline. “For me, I didn’t want my team to be on the sideline,” said Brochhagen. “After all this, they would be the ones doing the work. Our goal was to make sure that we were very integrated as a team between Silverline and our organization. We actually had representation across all of our business areas including customer support, finance, our strategic accounts, and our educators, whether it was participating in demos or helping to elaborate the requirements for user stories.”

To keep things moving quickly, the implementation went in real-time, modeling the kind of programs they wanted to have in the future. “Most companies say, ‘I’m going to port everything over.’ That was not our approach,” said Brochhagen. “We actually took three or four different clients and their programs, set them up and proved we could conduct the patient journey with these new features.”

Adding flexibility for complex customer relationships

No two clients are exactly alike, but Salesforce gives VMS the flexibility to adapt to whatever the client needs. As their programs change, they can easily go where the client needs them to be. “With one client, we were doing all of our engagements live,” said Brochhagen. “With COVID-19, we switched completely to virtual support. In the past, we would have had to completely rebuild on the back end. Now, that’s a piece of cake.”

Automating back-end billing cycles

It’s easy to forget the administrative work on the back-end that makes a business run. With complex client setups and a custom tool, billing became more and more challenging. Automating that with Salesforce was a huge relief.

“As a client-focused organization, we bill differently client-to-client,” said Brochhagen. “Now, we have one source of truth. Being able to bill at a patient level, case level, or event level makes such a difference.” 

The Results: speed wins

Even though VMS has only been using Salesforce a few months, the results have been immediate, accelerating their programs. “We can get up and running for our provider programs in no more than four weeks, whereas before it was twice that,” said Brochhagen. “A patient program takes weeks to configure, and before it took months.”

With Salesforce, VMS BioMarketing increased their flexibility and agility to keep up with their customers as they build patient journeys and continuously optimizing the journeys rather than set it and forget it. “Sometimes we start out thinking one way, but after a month of data, we decide to change. It gives us an opportunity to do some of that experimentation and then look back and say, how can we actually connect better with patients?”

Plus, it’s been easier across their organization to implement, with internal support tickets decreasing by 50%, even as they onboard a completely new system to the team. Their educators are coming onboard in two weeks, and the team agrees it’s a much easier system to use. “They know where to find and put any new information,” said Brochhagen. “They can look at a dashboard and say, ‘These are the patients I need to call today.’ It’s so much easier to manage their day and know exactly what needs to happen.”

As a top Salesforce partner in healthcare, Silverline leverages best practices acquired through more than a thousand implementations, with a core healthcare team led by professionals with deep, varying experience in consulting, clinical, and technical roles. We know Health Cloud, and we’re ready to combine your needs with the power of the platform.