Improve patient care by digitally transforming with Salesforce and Conga

Healthcare operations are evolving and needs are changing, with greater urgency than ever before. Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) organizations are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, meeting the extraordinary needs caused by this disease, and finding new and more effective ways to operate is more critical than ever. Manual processes are holding the industry back by adding unnecessary risk, limiting the ability to scale to meet increasingly demanding needs, and, most importantly, taking focus away from where it's needed most: on patients and members.

Challenges in the HLS industry

The HLS industry is facing changing dynamics, presenting challenges that existing processes and systems are not able to solve. They need to create new efficiencies, cost savings, better compliance, and improved patient care and communication.

Each area of the industry is facing its own set of challenges:

Providers and payers need to accelerate processes and business operations to deal with the competition in the market while providing better quality patient care. 

Healthcare institutions are focused on improving the patient care experience, managing, and processing health information, and staying secure, private, and compliant. 

Life sciences companies are also on a quest to manage costs, form innovative partnerships, enhance customer engagement, and stay ahead of changing regulatory requirements as part of the shifting landscape.  

With the right set of digital transformation solutions, HLS organizations can leave behind manual processes to improve patient care and scale their response to the current pandemic.

Salesforce Health Cloud helps teams across all HLS disciplines drive digital transformation on a secure, scalable, and customizable platform. They can build stronger relationships, collaborate more intelligently, and work more quickly to transform patient outcomes.

Together with Salesforce, Conga enables HLS organizations to generate documents and contracts from data within the Health Cloud, collect digital signatures online while writing data back to the Health Cloud, and automates processes to ensure accurate and efficient patient care.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the manual, inefficient processes in our industry," said Kathryn Chin, Salesforce HLS Ecosystem Strategy. "Salesforce with Conga helps facilitate touch-less handoffs, which create streamlined workflows for our customers.”

How is the HLS industry digitally transforming?

Healthcare providers

Healthcare providers manage everything from patient care to physician networks, often through multiple manual systems. In a role that’s manual and paperwork-heavy, providers need a solution that allows them to spend more time on creating a personalized, patient-first experience, rather than chasing down paperwork and juggling multiple systems. Especially now, as we face more uncertainty than ever with the coronavirus pandemic and barriers to in-person communication, patient engagement is critical to improving their experience and overall understanding of their own healthcare and wellness.

With Salesforce and Conga, providers can easily engage patients on any device and collaborate across the entire healthcare network. An integrated CRM connects EHR data, treatment plans, patient preferences, and more, giving providers a 360-degree view of the patient, as well as the ability to deliver truly personalized experiences. And with digital document solutions, providers can streamline patient enrollment, onboarding, claims processing, and billing, while maintaining HIPAA compliance and privacy. What’s more, Conga enables providers to virtually generate patient health documents automatically, and negotiate contracts and physician-provider agreements digitally, then approve and securely sign them.

The New York State Health Foundation uses Conga to create time savings and staff efficiency, increased accuracy in their grant agreement packages, plus increased satisfaction among their users and recipients in an improved delivery process. The seamless integration with Salesforce enabled NYSHealth to easily and quickly merge standard and custom data into standardized, branded templates within Conga Composer. It provides them with the ideal balance of flexibility and consistency, and efficiencies that allow them to focus more time on their patients.

Healthcare payers

Members expect a seamless and personalized experience from healthcare payers, with access to relevant health information at any time on any device. However, with disparate systems in place, payers often can’t meet these expectations, instead delivering a disjointed experience with slowed processes and increased room for error.

In today’s landscape, member retention is more important than ever, and payers need to be able to engage members throughout their healthcare journey to earn their trust. In fact, 36 percent of members have indicated they would be willing to switch health insurance if it meant they would receive a better experience. And research shows that current satisfaction levels are less than ideal, with fewer than 50 percent of payer members reporting a satisfactory experience across affordability, coverage, and care coordination.

With Salesforce and Conga, payers can create a single source of truth for the entire member journey, tailored to each individual member’s health needs and communication preferences. An integrated CRM platform and digital document solution will improve operational efficiencies and reduce risk as payers maintain the strict compliance they need. In addition, the combined solution empowers call center agents to drive better engagement and efficiency, ultimately establishing loyalty and trust between members and payers.

Conga customer Allianz Care has “revolutionized” the way they do things by turning a manual and labor-intensive process into an extremely efficient and streamlined process with the Conga Suite and Salesforce.

“What we really like about Conga is that it is seamlessly integrated within Salesforce, which ultimately makes it much easier for the users to adapt to the tool,” said Alexander Bender, the Global Head of CRM at Allianz Care. 

Team members who once spent days working on manual documentation can now manage new business pipeline, renewal pipeline, and build relationships with customers.

Life sciences - pharmaceuticals 

In the competitive pharmaceutical industry, an accelerated time-to-market of new treatments and drugs is critical, especially during a time where we’re racing towards a vaccine and effective treatments for COVID-19. Pharmaceutical companies need a streamlined way to distribute critical drug information to the right recipients at the right time, all while ensuring their sales teams are working as effectively as possible.

An integrated CRM platform increases efficiency by connecting supply chain, manufacturing, medical affairs, marketing, sales, and patient services, creating a unified provider-patient-partner experience with insights into each part of the process. Combined with Conga’s digital document solution, pharmaceutical companies can produce beautifully branded trial, treatment, outcome, and sales documents through automated process workflows, all within Salesforce, to exceed customer expectations and meet the demands of a competitive industry. 

Pharmaceutical companies have also found opportunities to accelerate their clinical trial programs through digital transformation. One company identified a significant bottleneck in their trials: contracting. Contracting with healthcare institutions to carry out company-sponsored clinical trials is known industry-wide as the number one cause of delays. 

With solutions from Salesforce and Conga, contract negotiation and signing can happen in just hours, and the added benefit of a simple, collaborative user interface can strengthen client relationships along the way. And streamlining the contracting process accelerates clinical trials, which means earlier patent submissions and earlier access to medication, benefiting both patients and society. 

Life sciences - medical device companies

In an industry where innovation is essential to success, medical device companies are still relying on manual, outdated sales processes to get their innovative products into the hands of medical professionals. A more streamlined, low-touch process is needed now more than ever, as in-person contact is limited in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, medical device and diagnostics companies are facing ongoing pricing pressure from legislators, payers, and customers, making a competitive edge and business acceleration dependent upon maximizing efficiency.

Medical device companies need more advanced technology to gain insights, track activities, close deals, and connect all points of the customer lifecycle, including business operations and patient services.

An integrated CRM in the Salesforce Health Cloud securely connects all sources of data from existing systems to deliver a unified, compliant, and efficient provider, patient, and partner experience on preferred channels. Combined with Conga, medical device organizations can streamline field quotes, proposals, and contracts while maintaining strict compliance and storing all documents within a secure cloud environment. Detailed audit trails for every contract and its workflows and approval process are stored as well, and encryption integrations ensure the documents maintain patient and physician privacy to comply with HIPAA and GDPR.

Healthcare innovator and medical device manufacturer Abiomed turned to Conga for a solution that would help improve their sales process and streamline laborious processes for forecasting, product program reviews, regional reports, field service documentation, and to manage contract terms and conditions. By implementing Conga Composer, sales reps could now generate their forecast with just a button click. Composer merges all relevant data and generates the output in seconds.

Now it’s your turn to transform

In the healthcare industry, nothing is more important than a strong, trusting relationship between patients, payers, and providers. By combining the Salesforce Health Cloud with Conga’s digital document transformation solutions, you’ll not only create time and cost efficiencies, but you’ll also build a transparent environment where all involved parties feel informed and in control of their healthcare journey.

Reach out today to learn more about how to transform your systems and processes with Salesforce and Conga.