The Healthcare industry faces a significant challenge in the post-pandemic world.

The pandemic taught us how important it is to listen, adapt, and respond to changing customer needs. But the fact remains that legacy systems and manual processes still run the health industry along with a high percentage of sensitive, personalized, and segregated data. And today's digital natives of the connected world demand that healthcare providers offer more tech-savvy ways of managing their care. The Affordable Care Act and outcome-based reimbursement policies create mandates and incentives for providers, payers, medical device and pharmaceutical companies to focus more on patient care and satisfaction.

According to Deloitte Future of Health, the life sciences and health care industry is on the brink of large-scale disruption. The future of health will likely be driven by radically interoperable data that will lead to highly personalized or hyper-local, consumer-centric health. Therefore, to succeed, healthcare organizations need to shift the focus beyond revenue cycle management and electronic health records to organizations focused on patient relationships.

And Salesforce Health Cloud is a great tool to overcome the wide gap and fuel digital transformation for payers, healthcare providers, pharma companies, and medical device manufacturers to be future-ready.

What is Salesforce Health Cloud? Patient Relationships. Beyond Records

Salesforce Health Cloud with its rich API structure and backend EHR system integration enables providers to gain a complete view of the patient with integrated data from electronic medical records (EMRs), wearables, and more. It gives powerful tools to helps organizations be future-ready for the challenges and opportunities; make smarter care decisions; engage with patients across their caregiver networks, and manage patient data.

The platform uses the power of social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies to provide everyone, from Salesforce admins to patients, access a data-driven, customer-centric approach to help teams across the healthcare and life science disciplines drive digital transformation on a secure and customizable platform. It treats patients like customers and is intended to help providers, insurers, and life sciences companies improve relationships with patients from a single console. It also sets up health providers with better tools to collaborate across the entire healthcare network, from care coordinators to service agents and family members.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a software development and delivery process enabling seamless collaboration between your Operations and Development teams to increases your organization's ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes. It aims at evolving and improving products at a higher velocity than the organizations using traditional software development. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

The Typical Salesforce Development Process (Without DevOps)

The usual Salesforce application development process is tightly bound within the confines of the Salesforce ecosystem. There is no need to install any software since everything a Salesforce developer or admin needs is in the cloud. However, the sandbox-driven development does not allow for versioning of your code and as a result, code overwrites are a common pain point and often complicate matters in cases of large projects or when multiple developers are working on the same project, and are not in sync.

The Need for Salesforce DevOps in Salesforce Health Cloud

While most developers and healthcare organizations are comfortable sticking to the existing Salesforce applications, for others, pushing the boundaries and adopting the best practices of the larger software development world allows them to integrate best-of-breed solutions into custom Salesforce cloud solutions. Adopting the broader principles and best practices of DevOps when building Salesforce applications for Salesforce Health cloud helps automate every step of the app development process; Build, Test, and Deployment, as well as ensure more frequent releases and more confidence. Moreover, applying DevOps practices to Salesforce helps achieve CI/CD as well as continuous testing for better collaboration and quicker feedback loops. Automation of deployment pipelines allows for real-time identification of the requirement and the ability to address concerns quickly.

Top 5 Benefits of Bringing DevOps into Salesforce Health Cloud

• Holistic 360-Degree View of the Patient's Journey

Healthcare professionals often struggle juggling multiple siloed systems while still trying to meet the demand for communication among the team, facilities, and patients. The average hospital uses at least 16 disparate EHR systems. Salesforce Health Cloud helps connect siloed systems using Health Level 7 (HL7) APIs to integrate EHRs and legacy systems to offer a comprehensive view of the patient. Salesforce Health Cloud accesses data from multiple sources including:

• Electronic Health Records (EHR)
• Medical Devices
• Wearable tech

A provider can deliver personalized and collaborative experiences to enable a 360-degree view into patient data to:

• Create rich patient profiles
• Access collaborative care network and health timelines
• Combine patient data from the electronic health record
• Integrate third-party data from medical devices

Bringing DevOps to custom Salesforce health cloud solutions helps unlock healthcare transformation, reduce complexity and boost Salesforce delivery so that your healthcare organization can unlock more ROI from their Salesforce investment.

• Smarter Patient Engagement and Management

Salesforce health cloud streamlines processes to reduce complexities and drives seamless patient engagement. Healthcare providers can:

• Prioritize tasks across all their patient needs
• Segment and better manage engagement among the patient population
• Better map personal and professional healthcare networks

However, as the size of the organization grows and as Salesforce complexity grows, it can be a challenge for delivery teams to keep up. Enabling DevOps and a powerful ALM (DevOps tools with native Salesforce UI like Flosum) helps leverage automation for scalable and agile solutions. Thus, with a more connected patient engagement, Healthcare providers and clinicians can better engage members throughout their healthcare journey. With Salesforce Health Cloud, providers can give patients, caregivers, and their staff members more immediate, streamlined access to key information. It gives patients more autonomy over their own healthcare journeys, while also helping those aiding in their care deliver more personalized, efficient care.

• Regulatory Compliance and Data Security

According to the 2020 HIMSS Cybersecurity Survey, significant security incidents are the norm among health organizations. These continue to plague healthcare organizations of all types and sizes. Salesforce Cloud offers Salesforce Shield, a trio of security tools that helps admins and developers build extra levels of trust, compliance, and governance right into business-critical apps. It includes Shield Platform Encryption, Event Monitoring, and Field Audit Trail.

Healthcare has strict security requirements and requires platform encryption, audit trails, event monitoring, as well as protection of all PHI data. Salesforce health cloud provides a series of security tools for use to comply with regulations on storing protected health information. To achieve compliance with HIPAA, Salesforce Shield offers several encryption options applying in a granular fashion. However, as healthcare and capabilities become more complex, DevOps solutions like Flosum further help meet security and compliance challenges with securely built, managed, and maintained solutions on Salesforce Health Cloud that simplify deployments, automate conflict resolution, and help your team collaborate better for rapid delivery. The purpose-built custom Salesforce solutions provides Healthcare providers with the necessary quality gates to support security and compliance.

• Greater Agility and Faster Speed to Market

Time to market has been a major challenge as witnessed in the struggle of the healthcare industry to make the vaccine available to the people. Health Cloud connects critical processes, data, and teams, but that is not sufficient enough as the scale becomes more complex. Infusing DevOps with Health Cloud confers a competitive advantage from agile best practices and helps automate the infrastructure management. This in turn helps cut back on development time and deliver a faster (Go To Market) GTM strategy for strengthened competitive advantage.

Flosum Helps You Unlock ROI in Salesforce Health Cloud

Flosum, the all-in-one DevOps solution brings together people, processes, and technology to optimize, visualize, and govern business value flow through your entire Salesforce ecosystem.

The solution is designed with a "clicks not code" approach to achieve the goals that Salesforce developers require, allowing changes to components limited by Git-based solutions, keeping orgs in sync, and executing deployments quicker than ever before.

Want to know how you can make the most out of the Salesforce Health Cloud to transform your patient experience? Flosum can give you peace of mind. Get in touch with the best Salesforce Health Cloud Experts to leverage the world-class Salesforce Health Cloud solutions today.