Healthcare & Life Sciences Cloud: Use Salesforce in health

Delays in clinical trials, regulatory approvals, and market launches can lead to up to $40,000 per day in lost revenue in the life sciences. After products are launched, there is further revenue loss when teams effectively educate HCPs, manage payer policy submissions, and ensure patients adhere to therapy. Poorly coordinated and disconnected health records make it difficult for teams to coordinate all three activities for all stakeholders in the healthcare industry.

Salesforce’s Health Cloud is enhanced by Life Sciences Cloud and Agentforce, offering a comprehensive healthcare CRM solution that provides a single location for all patient, provider, and partner interactions. An additional benefit of the cloud is its ability to integrate data, use ML to enhance operational workflows, and allow for more consistent engagement. A better understanding of patients’ journeys and their care interactions enables organizations to drive better health outcomes while continuing to manage compliance, communications, and commercial elements.

Let’s take a look behind the curtain of Salesforce and learn how healthcare organizations can implement Salesforce systems for their own good.

Salesforce solutions implementation: Key takeaways

• To integrate Salesforce and actually start benefitting from it, health organizations have to plan, train their staff, and focus on compliance.
• Salesforce Health Cloud enables consistent patient care delivery.
• With Health Cloud, you can automate business operations and unite health teams around a single view of your patients, members, and partners.
• Implementing Salesforce in healthcare processes provides access to a range of customization options and additional tools, depending on your organization’s size and scale.

Patient engagement and care coordination challenge in modern healthcare

Patient engagement and coordination of patient care remain structurally complicated across the healthcare industry, as fragmented healthcare data and disconnected systems limit the ability to view the complete patient journey. Electronic health records are not connected, making it hard for healthcare providers to access reliable, up-to-date information when making decisions or coordinating care.

Market growth is an indicator of the extent of the coordination issue. The global market for care management software was valued at USD 14.67 billion in 2024, and it is projected to reach USD 33.26 billion by 2030, with an annualized growth rate of 14.8% between 2025 and 2030. This means healthcare organizations will invest more in healthcare software that integrates diverse healthcare data, supports care teams during treatment, and enables patients to engage and be actively involved in their care across the continuum of care.

Using real-time data to facilitate decision-making will improve response times and reduce the risk of duplicate diagnostics and/or treatment misalignment. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a lack of care coordination may increase healthcare costs by as much as twenty percent due to unnecessary tests and redundant interventions.

The lack of an integrated healthcare system will result in operational inefficiencies and the use of multiple systems for managing operations (some of which are manual). As the demand for coordinated, patient-centered care grows, the requirement for integrated systems to assist healthcare providers in managing engagement, workflows, and outcomes increases as well.

Salesforce Health Cloud platform overview and core capabilities

Salesforce Health Cloud platform has plenty of healthcare-specific functionality built in. More specifically, it integrates its own data models, care management workflows, and engagement tools, enabling it to coordinate services more effectively.

Patient 360 and Unified Data Management

The Health Cloud brings together different sources of patient data. Examples of disparate sources are EMR’s (electronic medical records), claims systems, and engagement platforms. With the Health Cloud, a provider’s care team will have one place to find all the elements required to deliver high-quality patient care, including individual medical histories, patient interactions with the provider, care plans, and patient preferences. Using The Health Cloud improves access to patient data and reduces the administrative burden of managing multiple disparate systems, creating a single source of truth for each patient’s records.

Care Coordination and Care Plan Management

Many coordinators must communicate extensively with others to coordinate care among physicians, specialists, care managers, and support staff. Health Cloud can manage personalized care plans, define responsibilities and tasks, and track progress and patient goals on a single platform. The availability of shared visibility also reduces disconnected communication. By making it easier to coordinate care across departments and organizations, the Health Cloud provides teams with continuity and consistency in patient care delivery.

Patient Engagement and Communication

Patient engagement can be much more than simple appointment reminders. By using Health Cloud, organizations can deliver personalized communication, manage outreach programs, and continue interacting with their patients throughout the patient journey.

Intelligent Scheduling and Referral Management

Scheduling appointments remains among the most labor-intensive operations in healthcare. Health Cloud makes it easy to automate workflows for referrals, book appointments, manage waitlists, and coordinate care.

Provider Network and Partner Management

Healthcare organizations rely on an extensive network of consumer-focused providers, business partners, and third parties to ensure the delivery of healthcare services. Health Cloud offers provider onboarding, credentialing, contract management, and network administration as part of its overall solution. The tools within Health Cloud enable a healthcare organization to maintain accurate records of all providers within its Network and facilitate easier collaboration across the complex healthcare ecosystem.

Extend the power of Health Cloud with related Salesforce products

Healthcare organizations need diverse functionality. Salesforce healthcare CRM can be extended with additional features, so you don’t have to opt for a one-size-fits-all option. 

The beauty of the healthcare cloud is that you can start small. Connect marketing, sales, service, and commerce on a single platform, then boost collaboration in Slack.

Salesforce integration plan

The successful implementation of Salesforce Health Cloud encompasses many aspects. It’s not just about a simple implementation of new technology. Aligning processes, data, and user adoption strategies is essential for healthcare organizations to achieve measurable value from the platform. Health Cloud is one of the best healthcare CRM software solutions on the market today, but results depend on how well it meets existing operational needs.

Define objectives before configuration

Focus first on business objectives when implementing a system, rather than on the platform’s features. For example, has your healthcare organization identified the challenges to be addressed when implementing your system (e.g., increasing patient engagement, reducing administrative burden, streamlining referrals, improving care coordination)?

Prioritize data integration and quality

Data quality is just as important. If a user cannot trust the information in Salesforce due to duplicate patient records, incomplete or missing data, or inconsistent standards for storing this type of patient data, the system’s trust level and overall benefits will not be as high as they could be. Many organizations put considerable effort into preparing and validating data before migrating it to Salesforce.

Focus on adoption among healthcare professionals

Healthcare practitioners must integrate the application into their daily routines to ensure that even the most sophisticated healthcare CRM software works.

Multiple teams use Health Cloud in various ways. Care coordinators may utilize care plan and outreach capabilities, while administrative staff may utilize scheduling and referral management. Training should highlight each user group’s unique method and provide value through real-world use cases.

Address compliance early

The industry has a robust set of regulations that define and govern how healthcare organizations operate. Security and compliance are vital elements of this implementation planning process. Access control, audit trails, consent management, and data-sharing policies should be considered during system implementation rather than added later.

Depending on the specialty or region, certain regulatory requirements may necessitate additional configurations to meet them.

Consider automation carefully

Automation and AI can help reduce administrative burden while improving operational efficiency when using Health Cloud. However, automation typically requires well-defined processes before it can be initiated. When automating inconsistent processes, organizations are likely to create new challenges as well as solve some existing ones.

Before implementing automation in any activity, organizations must consider what is eligible for automation and what will require human intervention in patient communications or clinical decision-making.

When Salesforce Health Cloud may not be the right fit

While Salesforce Health Cloud can provide significant benefits for complex healthcare situations, not all organizations require the same degree of infrastructure. For example, if you are a small clinic with only basic scheduling and very limited methods for reaching out to patients, but an adequate electronic medical record is in place, you might not need to implement the entire Salesforce Health Cloud.

When using legacy systems within a healthcare organization, complexity can increase due to outdated systems, heavily customized workflows, separate database stores with poor-quality data, or any combination of these. Using a legacy system to implement new technology is still possible. Still, it will require more time for preparation, integration of the new technology with other systems, and change management efforts.

Another case would be highly specialized clinical workflows. If the majority of day-to-day operations rely on niche medical systems that can’t reliably integrate with Salesforce, then Health Cloud may be just another layer (not a beneficial operational hub). A fit assessment should be conducted upfront, before selecting a platform.

Want to learn more about Salesforce Health Cloud solutions? Contact Avenga, your trusted technology partner.

Rate this article!

Average 0.0 out of 5

Vladyslav Betsun

Technology Researcher

Vladyslav Betsun is a Technology Researcher at Avenga, diving deep into BFSI, FinTech, HealthTech, AI, ML, Salesforce, and beyond. He translates complex technology research into accessible, compelling narratives. His goal is to help teams understand what's next in their fields.