Salesforce Winter '24 Release Highlights for Health Cloud Users

Whether you’ve already had a couple of weeks to poke around your Winter ‘24 release version of Salesforce or you’re only just starting to sort through the changes, there’s a lot to unpack in this latest update. We know the idea of updating your Health Cloud instance can feel overwhelming, but regularly updating your Health Cloud org is an essential part of maintaining a secure, compliant, and efficient healthcare operation — check out our recent blog post if you want more context around the importance of keeping your Health Cloud instance up-to-date. 

What’s new with Health Cloud?

Health Cloud is packed with new functionality for the Health & Life Sciences crowd, and we’re gonna be honest — these are always our favorite Salesforce updates. Kicksaw is passionate about the HLS industry, and any opportunity to further improve our clients’ experience with Salesforce, and our clients’ tech stack as a whole, is exciting. We’ll be putting these new features through their paces in the coming weeks and months, but here’s what we know so far.

Home Health

Health Cloud’s Home Health is sporting a few new updates and enhancements — a particular favorite of ours is that the feature now integrates with Medication Management and Integrated Care Management. These integrations give your healthcare org options to provide better patient care and safety. Visit scheduling and tracking is easier now with Electronic Visit Verification, automated checks for patient eligibility, plus comprehensive calendar views.

Another update we’re pleased to see is the option to reduce scheduling time via the Care Professional Recommendation update. Identify care professionals who are the best fit for your patient’s needs by analyzing the care professionals’ missed appointment history, treatment frequency for multiple parameters, utilization rates, and average service appointment duration. Reduce last-minute rescheduling mishaps, share workloads among your network fairly, and enhance the patient experience with this excellent option.

Crisis Support Center Management Enhancements

With this latest release, crisis center counselors can now communicate with clients via web chat or SMS. That communication is enhanced thanks to the option to associate social determinants of health directly with cases — providers now have better tools to understand and address care barriers at their fingertips. Also new with this latest release: a flow to send emails to care facility admins prompting an update on open bed count in their facilities. The flow also confirms requested beds for referrals. 

Advanced Therapy Management Enhancements

Track chain of identity and chain of custody for biosamples with ease using Advanced Therapy Management’s new Custody Management feature. Plus, you can now tailor task fields and streamline clinical process lead times using a hierarchy of conditions for override. Finally, service territory prioritization rules let you optimize searches for appointment slots.

Integrated Care Management Enhancements

Integrated Care Management has a new home. A dedicated app puts care plans, care caps, assessments, and a CRM Analytics dashboard front and center to help users view what’s most important to them for their daily activities.   

Better still, though, is the ability to Create Care Plans from Care Gaps or from an Assessment using an OmniScript flow. This new option empowers your healthcare org to identify care gaps, as well as your patients’ problems, goals, and interventions on an updated care plan interface. Further, mapping assessment question responses and recommendations is now easier thanks to updates to the Decision Tables user interface.  

Home Healthcare Service Enhancements

Analytics got a slew of upgrades, of course. All are aimed at giving you a complete view of your data to help you deliver effective, personalized patient care. Two standouts from the long list of improvements include:

• Referral Analytics, which gives healthcare professionals who are looking to optimize their patient referral process insight into how effective their physician network is (or isn’t) at referring patients — crucial data for healthcare orgs looking to scale.
• Home Health Insights, which provide some excellent KPIs related to both Care Resources and Patients. Get a better look at resource utilization (care resource to patient ratio, drive times, average appointment time, etc) to gain efficiency with appointment scheduling.

Actionable Relationship Center Enhancements

A holistic view of hierarchical accounts is available with Actionable Relationship Center’s Graph Builder and Relationship Graph enhancements. Define a graph’s starting point as an anchor node, track the anchor node path, and view the upward hierarchy of related entities with these enhancements.

Referral Enhancements

Automation tools, enhanced Clinical Data Model objects, and APIs built for the Salesforce platform can help you manage your referrals in smarter, more efficient ways. Check out the new referral management features, which use standard objects in the FHIR R4-aligned data model. Use the Create Referral flow to gather data and create related records (this flow can also be used on your Provider Portal Experience cloud site), track accepted referrals, and use inbound documents to create new referrals.

Assessments Enhancements

Intakes and admitting just got a little easier, with libraries of prebuilt template assessments. These templates use Discovery Framework and OmniStudio make it easier to get up and running with assessments, and include Behavioral Health Content and Crisis Support Content forms.

A full rundown of all that’s new and different can be found on Salesforce’s Health Cloud Release Notes page, but these updates cover what our team is most excited about. 

Maximize your Salesforce Investment

There’s so much to learn about each and every release, and of course, just as with any solution, there is a learning curve to all the changes that Salesforce rolled out with this latest release. It can feel overwhelming to incorporate new functionality into your Salesforce org, but that’s where we come in. We want you to succeed! We want to see your healthcare org thrive, and we’re here to provide the support you need in order to achieve your goals. 

If you want to learn more about how the latest changes to Health Cloud can improve your org’s operations, enhance your patients’ experiences, or simplify your day-to-day, just reach out to us! Fill out the Contact Us form at the bottom of this page, send us a message on our site chat, or reach out to CEO Kenny Goldman on LinkedIn. We look forward to connecting with you!