Salesforce unwraps platform for post-EHR world

Salesforce unwraps platform for post-EHR world

The cloud-based software vendor is driving toward what it calls ‘precision healthcare,’ not to be confused with precision medicine

Essentially confirming months of rumors about its intentions to plant a flag in the healthcare market, Salesforce.com has unveiled Health Cloud.

The software-as-a-service suite features what the company calls “patient relationship management” tools – which are technologically distinct from today’s crop of electronic health record systems.

“We think we are among the pioneers in the post-EHR world,” Salesforce chief medical officer Joshua Newman, MD, told Healthcare IT News ahead of the launch. “We think about this as precision healthcare.”

By releasing Health Cloud, Salesforce is joining the growing crop of platforms that offer more comprehensive views of patient data than electronic health records, though today’s class of products doing that each take a different tack.

Precision healthcare?

Anyone paying attention knows two things about precision medicine right now. First, it’s a grand vision everyone hopes comes to fruition, for patients’ sake. Second, despite President Obama’s much-touted backing with the Precision Medicine Initiative, that won’t happen anytime soon, at least not on a wide scale.

Not to be confused with precision medicine – which strives to incorporate genomics, bioinformatics and other cutting-edge uses of data to tailor individually-specific treatment regiments – what Newman calls precision healthcare is about “managing patients and not records,” he said.

As such Health Cloud integrates data from a variety of sources, including EHRs, medical devices and wearables, among others, that care coordinators and clinicians can view in a modern social network-style dashboard interface.

Notable features include Timeline, which enables providers to see the patient’s health journey, and the Patient Caregiver Map, which helps clinicians track relationships in the patient’s household and with doctors and specialists.

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