Salesforce Health Cloud Provides Support for Medical Device Companies

The new pharmaceutical features will help companies to develop more direct relations with patients.

On Tuesday, Salesforce launched new capabilities for its Health Cloud that target specific segments in the life sciences sector— the drug industry and companies in medical devices. The development of Salesforce’s Health Cloud forms part of the greater effort of the CRM giant to compete with industry-specific software for SAP and Oracle.

The Health Cloud also provides tools for pharmaceutical companies to directly communicate with patients. This includes the new Guided Program Inscription feature, which helps a life science firm to easily create therapeutic support programs with health providers.

For example, a pharmaceutical company could use the function to develop a therapeutic treatment program for patients. The company can easy arrange patient onboarding, insurance verification, copay programs and other elements to set up the treatment program and ensure that patients adhere to the program through guided program registration.

Dr Ashwini Zenooz, Salesforce’s SVP and GM in Healthcare and Life Sciences: “We’ve been hearing a lot more from our customers in the life sciences,” “They feel they want to work with patients more.” At the same time, patients seem to want to work more closely with life science companies, she said. Salesforce clients already have call center staff involved with patients to provide them with additional information on pharmaceutical products.

Salesforce also published new survey data on Tuesday that reflect this notion. 62% of health users say that it is very important for pharmaceutical companies to inform them about how to get the most from their medicines, according to the survey. The report, which examined almost 6,000 global health consumers on their expectations and experiences, also revealed that only 40% of consumers said that their communications from the health and life sciences industry were pertinent to them.

“These businesses participated or would like to participate in the move to personalized medicine,” Zenooz said.

The Guided Program Registration feature was designed to facilitate more data-driven personal conversations with pharmaceutical companies that patients are searching for.

Salesforce also introduces a Patient Services Consent Management feature to complement Guided Program Enrolment. It allows companies of drug or medical products to easily view consent forms and to receive patient approval with an eSignature.

In the medical equipment sector, Salesforce brings new sales deals and account-based forecasting to the Health Cloud. The power of Sales Agreements allows medical device companies to control sales, size, costs and revenue obligations for products, so that Inventory and Operations Teams can collectively monitor how consumers meet their commitments.

Medical equipment manufacturers can construct a baseline forecast using demand and account growth factors compared to last year’s figures for account-based forecasting. Teams will change the forecasts to reflect an increase or decrease in their market share of a provider company’s total device sales.