Hottest New Health Cloud Features in Salesforce Winter '23

This blog post was written by Kicksaw Sr Solution Architect Brian Murphey.

Winter is coming! Here at Kicksaw HQ, there’s always a frenzy of activity whenever new Salesforce release notes become available, and this time around we’re extra excited about some of the new features that will be available to Health Cloud customers. Let’s dive in and check out some of the cool new things we’ll get to work with later this year!

Health Cloud (Lite) for Life Sciences

Anyone who has worked with Health Cloud knows that it is a massive, unwieldy package packed with different industry data models, metadata, and features from across the entire Salesforce ecosystem. It appears that we're getting a streamlined version of Health Cloud targeted specifically at the Life Sciences sector. We’re excited to hear more about this new offering, as any attempt to simplify technology in the HLS space is always welcome news!

Virtual Care for the Win

Anyone who has worked in the healthcare space for the last decade knows that Telemedicine is soooo hot right now. Salesforce has announced an integration with Amazon Chime that will allow for video calls between patients and providers out-of-the-box (a separate Amazon Chime account is required). Now your customers will be able to access video appointments through a secure Experience Cloud site (which Kicksaw recommends for all of our HLS customers’ communications), self-schedule virtual care visits, receive appointment reminders, and more, all without needing to integrate with a 3rd-party solution. Sign us up!

Improved Health Assessments

While there aren’t many details on this feature in the release notes, the proposed addition of OmniStudio, Discovery Framework, and dedicated Lightning Component functionality makes us hopeful that healthcare forms are getting a serious makeover in Winter ‘23. The HLS industry is built on forms–referrals, health histories, program enrollments, service requests, and more, all add up to a lot of data coming from a lot of sources. Currently, Kicksaw usually recommends integrating with a tool like Formstack when there is a need to manage a lot of paperwork with Health Cloud. Hopefully these new enhancements can make for one less tool in our clients’ tech stacks.

Medication Management

Salesforce clearly has the pharmacy sector in their crosshairs based on their new medication management features. If you haven’t seen it already, the Patient Medication Manager is a Health Cloud component that has an integration with RxNorm. This component allows providers to get up-to-date medication info, be alerted to possible drug interactions, and perform medication reconciliations to ensure safe prescription regimens for patients. Until now, this feature has seemed largely targeted towards care coordinators managing care transitions, but with features like targeted medication reviews, clinical issue alerts, medication to-do lists, therapy review flows, and even a guided setup tool, we can see a ton of value for pharmacies, PBMs, and any other company who needs to work with their customers’ medications. (Note: Some of these features require the Health Cloud Medication Management add-on license)

And One More Thing…

While this isn’t specifically a Health Cloud feature, the upcoming release of Dynamic Forms for standard objects has us licking our proverbial chops. Patient and Member records tend to be loaded with data that is very criteria-dependent. Does your patient require in-person visits as well as virtual care? You may need to capture extra address and preference data. Is your group member the primary or a dependent? You might need different demographic and consent data displayed on their records. Until now, we’ve had to manage this through a myriad of record types, page layouts, and flow updates, but now we can set our criteria directly on the record page and let Salesforce sort it out for us. It’s a win all around!

Summary

Winter ‘23 is bringing a ton of exciting new features to Health Cloud and the Salesforce platform as a whole. While these are a few of our favorites, there are many more that we don’t have space to list. Did we miss anything that you’re particularly looking forward to? Do you have an interesting use case for some of these features? Shoot us a comment on our LinkedIn and join the discussion!