As one of the oldest healthcare organizations in the US, the client’s patient data estate was an aggregate of inputs pooled from online or hand-written forms, customer relationship management applications and external sources. The client aimed to elevate patient experience with digital engagement for which fragmented data was a bottleneck, not an enabler.
The siloed data risked operational inefficiencies, mounting storage costs, and regulatory non-compliance arising due to failure to maintain unified patient records.
These headwinds rendered efforts to provide a seamless patient experience futile. It was time to act.
Fragmented Data Sends Fissures Across Operations
Data is one of the top two challenges that healthcare organizations face when they try to modernize patient experience.
While the client used TIBCO as the integration tool across data sources, its inability to use data for marketing or analysis meant licenses and expanding storage costs were sunken.
Without validation, the data estate had accumulated 5M records, of which 1.2 million were duplicated. In the marketing engine, these duplicated records represented unique accounts with varying degrees of information asymmetry. Marketing teams could not consolidate target profiles, sending inconsistent and contradictory messages that created confusion and frustrated patients.
At the operational level, care teams had to manually sift through these records to create a 360-degree view of patient histories, often running into delays or errors that could potentially undermine care plans. This also carried regulatory risk, where the client could fail audits due to a lack of unified patient records, inviting legal and reputational liabilities.
With a significant Salesforce footprint, the client needed help to leverage the Salesforce ecosystem to address these gaps to elevate patient experience. It turned to Persistent – a Salesforce powerhouse with more than 2,800 Salesforce consultants and 11,000 certifications – to drive the charter.
Unifying Data Layer with Salesforce
Persistent identified the need for a consolidated data layer to support patient experience initiatives. We implemented Salesforce Data 360 as the foundational data layer. This provided the marketing and operations teams with a single source of truth, improving care decisions and the effectiveness of outreach campaigns.
This was complemented by rigorous data validation, driven by advanced identity resolution rules, to consolidate duplicate records and ensure patient profiles are updated as one with incoming data. This helped care teams access unified patient records, make data-backed decisions on care plans and ensure adherence with targeted reminders and appointment tracking. To free up storage in Salesforce Health Cloud that contained records on clinical encounters such as historical diagnosis or procedures, we bypassed TIBCO and moved 23 million records to Salesforce Data 360 via Direct Connector (OOTB) of secure file transfer protocol. This freed up 26 GB of storage upfront and allowed detailed diagnosis and procedure data to feed seamlessly into Marketing Cloud, enabling granular patient segmentation and outreach for mammography, colorectal cancer, lung cancer and orthopedics.
Enabling Digital Healthcare with Data as the Foundation
Our team of healthcare experts and deeply embedded Salesforce consultants leveraged Salesforce Data 360 to deliver:
- Unified patient data: A consolidated data estate hosted on Salesforce Data 360 with identity resolution rules ensures consistent unique entries per patient.
- Improved marketing efficiency: The marketing cloud interacts seamlessly with the Salesforce Data 360 to elevate marketing with targeted segmentation and outreach based on updated patient profiles and case histories.
- Enhanced patient experience: Care teams can leverage updated medical data to schedule appointments and ensure adherence to treatment plans for patients without having to sift through fragmented records manually.
- Significant storage optimization: Moving 23 million records to Salesforce Data 360 from Salesforce Health Cloud reduced storage needs, which together with moving away from TIBCO, saved 20% in costs.
The new data estate helps the client unleash operational efficiencies and supports better health outcomes for its patients.
