Salesforce
Health Cloud Implementation

Salesforce says Health Cloud is HIPAA compliant, and Health Cloud appears on its list of HIPAA Covered Services. Two conditions sit behind that. First, you and Salesforce must sign a Business Associate Addendum (BAA) that includes the service; Salesforce's compliance site says to ask your account representative for one. Second, Salesforce's BAA terms make the customer responsible for transmitting protected health information (PHI) securely and encrypting it.

So the build matters: which features are switched on, who can see which records, how consent is held and how data moves in and out. We design those controls with your compliance team during the assessment. To start, book a discovery call.

Salesforce Health Cloud is Salesforce's healthcare CRM for providers, payers and public health agencies. It holds the patient or member record, care plans, referrals, the contact center and appointments, and brings clinical data in from the EHR. Salesforce describes it as a layer that complements the EHR rather than replacing it.

Salesforce now uses the Agentforce name for parts of its healthcare offer: Trailhead's module for providers is titled "Meet Agentforce Health for providers". For AI agents that work on Health Cloud records, read Agentforce Health. For which Salesforce products fit which healthcare use case, see Salesforce for healthcare.

Health Cloud runs on the same Salesforce platform as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, with healthcare data models and processes added. Trailhead explains that its clinical data model takes information from an EHR through integration middleware, aligns with FHIR and supports many HL7 message types. It holds encounters, conditions, allergies, medications and immunizations next to the non-clinical data your teams already keep in Salesforce.

Salesforce lists these Health Cloud capabilities on its product page, among others:

• Integrated Care Management: care plans, with Agentforce suggesting assessments from the member record.
• Interoperability: bi-directional data flow through FHIR APIs and pre-built integrations.
• Utilization Management and Provider Relationship and Network Management for payers.
• Contact Center for Healthcare and Intelligent Appointment Management for patient access.
• Data 360 for Health, Intelligent Document Automation and Home Health.

Salesforce says the difference from Service Cloud is that Health Cloud comes with FHIR-aligned data models, care plans, referral management, a contact center and appointment management out of the box; building these in Service Cloud would need significant customization. For the integration work, see our Salesforce integration services.

Salesforce publishes four Health Cloud editions. Prices are per user per month in US dollars, billed annually, and Salesforce says they are for information only and subject to change.

Salesforce also offers a 30-day free trial. Licenses are only part of the cost: the implementation, the EHR integration and data migration depend on scope. Our Salesforce implementation cost guide explains what moves the price. For how Health Cloud works at each stage of the patient journey, see our Health Cloud patient experience guide.

A Health Cloud project needs people on both sides. On ours: a solution architect who owns the data model and the EHR integration design, consultants who configure care management, service and payer processes, integration developers for the FHIR and HL7 interfaces, and a data specialist for migration and reconciliation. On yours: a process owner, someone from compliance who agrees access and consent controls, an EHR or integration contact, and clinical and service staff for user acceptance testing.

Salesforce's CRM implementation guide says a small business can be live in a few weeks, while larger enterprises with complex integrations may need several months. In a Health Cloud project the EHR integration, the data to migrate and the compliance review set most of the length, so we set durations in the first phase, from your scope.

To plan your team and timeline, book a discovery call.

Agree the measures before the build, with a baseline taken from today's process, so the first review after go-live compares like with like. A health organization usually sets them with its implementation partner in the assessment phase and reviews them at 30, 60 and 90 days.

• Care plan completion: the share of enrolled patients or members whose care plan tasks and goals are completed on schedule.
• Referral turnaround: the time from a referral arriving to the patient being assessed or booked.
• Contact center handle time: average handle time and first-contact resolution for patient and member calls.
• Adoption: active users by team, and the share of care and service work recorded in Health Cloud rather than in spreadsheets or side systems.
• Data quality: how often EHR data arrives on time and matches the source, from the integration logs.

Set the targets from your own baseline, not from another organization's results. Health Cloud reports and dashboards can track these measures once the data model is live. To set yours, book a discovery call.