Healthcare & Life Sciences Takeaways from Dreamforce 2023

Dreamforce has come and gone, and our team proudly attended this year’s conference for a front-row seat to hear Salesforce’s latest innovations. These announcements ranged from AI-centric innovations to new Data Cloud features and everything in between.

Takeaways from Dreamforce 2023

With a highly skilled team of Salesforce consultants and developers with Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) experience, Perficient is especially interested in this year’s announcements for the vertical. Here are takeaways for Salesforce clients, consultants, and developers working in HLS.

1. During the HLS keynote, Lashonda Anderson-Williams, EVP & Chief Strategy Officer – Healthcare & Life Sciences, Salesforce, set the stage for the opportunity those in HLS continue to have when it comes to modernizing their operating models. Two statistics she shared stood out to me:
   1. First, on average, healthcare organizations have 46 systems in place dedicated to operations (Source: Salesforce Research, Healthcare & Life Sciences, April 2023). At Perficient, we have seen this firsthand, many times. Clients are swimming in tech that is redundant, costly, and underused, which creates a clunky, inefficient, and overwhelming operational model that gets in the way of the experience the organization is striving to deliver.
   2. Roughly 30% of health industry costs come from administrative work (Source: Health Affairs, Administrative Waste Study 2022). Reducing costs in HLS is imperative for sustaining our nation’s health system. The time is now to evaluate and reduce drivers of administrative costs.
2. Salesforce announced Life Sciences Cloud, an AI-powered CRM for med tech, pharma, and clinical operations. This adds to Salesforce’s existing HLS offering to bring more specialized capabilities to clients in this subsector. What makes it different from Health Cloud? Among other things, Life Sciences Cloud comes with turnkey, low-code features for streamlining early research phases, building target segments for clinical trials, qualifying participants, and ongoing sales and physician engagement.
3. AI, both traditional and generative, is a massive area of investment for Salesforce across all verticals. With Einstein, Salesforce has been offering traditional AI for years, but generative AI with Einstein GPT is about to explode. Einstein GPT combines propriety AI models with generative AI technology from partners, public large language models, and real-time data from Data Cloud. For HLS, the possibilities and use cases are endless for reducing costs, increasing efficiencies and response times, intelligent chat, scheduling appointments, and predicting patient needs. At Dreamforce, as many times as AI was mentioned, so was trust. Salesforce is making clear the responsibility and care they are taking to build trust in this AI era. For HLS, this means continued HIPAA-compliant products and keeping clinicians and operations specialists using their tools in control of the technology. Salesforce has built a trust layer with a zero-retention policy, meaning that data is kept completely separate from external large language models.
4. Data Cloud, sometimes referred to as Genie, Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) continues to evolve and empower amazing use cases in HLS. Data Cloud works by bringing together data from multiple sources to create a central, unified view of the patient. During the breakout session “Data Cloud for Health”, Salesforce client Brian Buckland, Senior Director – CRM Engineer at Teledoc, shared how the company is building intervention journeys using Data Cloud for Health. Interventions are based on incoming data points that warrant outreach. For example, Teledoc created an intervention for patients that use a durable medical device that requires daily readings. When a reading hasn’t been taken for three days, an intervention journey is sent through Marketing Cloud to get them back on track.
5. Salesforce is joining the fight against mental illness. Health Cloud introduced a new Crisis Support Center to help payers, public health organizations, and other nonprofits that operate crisis hotlines to quickly connect individuals experiencing a mental health emergency to safe and high-quality behavioral healthcare.
6. Past and future releases are bringing more focused use cases for all subsectors within HLS. There was a lot to unpack regarding the Health Cloud roadmap, and you’ll want to stay tuned for official release communications for Winter, Spring, and Summer ‘24 updates. But here’s a preview of what I think are some of the most exciting things coming:
   1. For home healthcare organizations, new capabilities for scheduling and clinician appointment insights.
   2. For providers, an enhanced interoperability platform with out-of-the-box FHIR APIs to reduce time and cost for integrating with Health Cloud. These will be usable for any provider using an EMR that exposes FHIR APIs or can send HL7 V2 events.
   3. For payers and providers, Health Cloud is improving features to strengthen provider relationships. This includes holistic views of providers and networks, new workflows to manage referrals, and a new provider data model.
   4. For life sciences, a chain of custody and e-signature offering to help advanced therapy providers remain compliant and drive patient safety.

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We are a Salesforce Summit Partner with more than two decades of experience delivering digital solutions in the manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, financial services, and high-tech industries. Our team has deep expertise in all Salesforce Clouds and products, artificial intelligence, DevOps, and specialized domains to help you reap the benefits of implementing Salesforce solutions.

For additional post-Dreamforce content, hear from Johnathon Rademacher, Principal of Perficient’s Salesforce practice, about 9 key takeaways from this year’s conference.