Patient-centric care has become more important than ever. According to a study conducted by Salesforce, 47 percent of consumers feel that healthcare and life sciences are more focused on industry needs than patient needs. Eighty-three percent of consumers say their experience with healthcare is as important as the services healthcare offers. While the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of telehealth, the physical distance between the patient and the provider has increased the awareness and the need for better patient experiences. 

In order to stay relevant in comparison to their competitors, providers must adapt to the change in rapidly evolving healthcare by redefining their services to make them patient-centric. After all, the same Salesforce study also suggests that 69 percent of consumers say one extraordinary experience raises expectations of other companies. While partnering with Salesforce and Salesforce Industries, Simplus is deploying solutions to the rapidly changing healthcare industry in order to make the providers’ business model more patient-centric.  

 

The barriers to patient-centric care

According to Gartner, the following are the most common challenges that stand in the way of building patient-centric care.

 

Socio-economic barriers: 

The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the socio-economic barriers in the US healthcare system. Evidence suggests that socio-economic status affects the individual health outcomes and the healthcare they receive. It is therefore imperative that any patient-centric system first and foremost addresses to reduce patient’s socio-economic related barriers to health care.

Siloed IT systems: 

To build patient-centric care, provider systems must exchange information at all levels, including user interface (UI), business logic, and data management. The goal is to increase cohesion and reduce unnecessary coupling. However, systems that are highly siloed increase coupling and make it impossible to drive cohesion among systems, resulting in siloed business operations. 

End-point applications:

Typical legacy systems at providers were built on end-point applications, each designed to solve only one business problem. As a result, orchestration of data to drive patient experience would introduce a monumental level of overhead making it impractical to create a holistic system that provides an end-to-end, patient-centric experience.

Poor master data management (MDM):

Data management is key to building a rich patient-centric experience. Providers need relevant data that is complete, accurate, and covers a broad spectrum of metrics on patient health. Working with systems in which there is no single source of truth further adds to the challenges with integration and proper information flow.

 

How can Simplus help solve these challenges?

Salesforce health cloud provides the social determinants of health data model through which institutions can gain insights into critical social and environmental factors that become barriers to patients’ or members’ wellness. By building visibility into the socioeconomic status of a patient, providers can gain a holistic perspective on factors that influence wellness, adherence, and outcomes. Therefore, quickly addressing barriers and reducing health setbacks for patients and members. 

As a single source of truth, Salesforce breaks down technical siloes by managing data through internal and external systems. Care teams can therefore access patient-related information through any system seamlessly—in the right context and in the right format—enabling the team to provide better care through Salesforce. Providers can also act as a single point of contact for the patients for any external lab services integrated into the provider’s Salesforce ecosystem. Providers can therefore collect samples from the patients, create a new lab test request, ship the samples, and allow the lab test to provide results of the test real-time into Salesforce through external integration. 

Through our design solutions, poor data management and lack of centralization are no longer the reasons for poor patient experience. Organizations can provide an empathy-driven portal in which the right data is not only easily accessible but also acted upon to deliver a great patient experience.