Most other industries are jumping up and down about Salesforce.com and ondemand/multi-tenant applications (that run over the internet). I don't see the same excitement from healthcare.
Its been said before that healthcare is more of a lagger than a leader when it comes to technology adoption, however is their more to it?
Thursday, March 5, 2009
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"A couple reasons. The first is that healthcare is just in the past few years making the transition from "patient" to "customer." Secondly, there are very few good tools that provide enterprise marketing solutions exclusively for healthcare and have been built from the ground up with the privacy and security protections that healthcare organizations require. We specialize in providing these kinds of tools exclusively for healthcare organizations."
ReplyDeletePosted by Kara Dowdall
"The main reason, in my opinion though, that delays the adoption of cloud technologies in Healthcare is privacy and security of the customer information. Even if few companies can come up with an architecture and implement such framework that addresses and takes care of the concerns surrounding the patient's privacy, the barriers remain for foreseeable future due to the missing uniformity and universal guidelines for all the parties involved in the complex Healthcare industry. However, it is evident that the platforms like [Salesforce.com|leo://plh/http%3A*3*3Salesforce%2Ecom/De6Q?_t=tracking_disc] or well anticipated MS Azure OS would play an important role to enhance the customer satisfaction and cost savings and profitability to the payers, networks, clinics/hospitals as well."
ReplyDeletePosted by Perubotla Ramamohan
"With the tighter regulations around the corner due to the Feb 2009 enactment of ARRA, it will be even more important to find a technology partner who has built a communication and marketing solution specifically around healthcare."
ReplyDeletePosted by Kara Dowdall, MSHA
Thank you all for your input.
ReplyDeleteSalesforce has now evolved into a platform whereby users can create their own applications on it, not just for marketing and sales but HR, operations, billing, supply chain etc. There are a myriad of ways it is being used these days, and healthcare with perhaps one of the largest software and IT footprint has the most to benefit from the use of cloud computing.
However, I also see Perubotla's point about the need for these apps to work well with each other, and to have some sort of uniformity specially with the given complexity of healthcare industry.
As far as security goes - Salesforce is used by some of the biggest financial companies with highly sensitive customer data on it- are we to believe that all healthcare facilities, and software companies with solutions for healthcare have better security? OR is it a different type of security?
"I believe one of the biggest differences is because we operate exclusively in the healthcare world, we have chosen to deploy single-tenant SaaS (each client having their own physical server) vs. multi-tenant SaaS. We actually complement and can work with CRM implementations such as [Salesforce.com|leo://plh/http%3A*3*3Salesforce%2Ecom/De6Q?_t=tracking_disc] as opposed to competing directly with it. We are in different worlds - theirs being sales lead automation, and ours is enterprise marketing."
ReplyDeletePosted by Kara Dowdall, MSHA
"We did actually fairly recently an evaluation to check if Salesforce components could enhance/complement our 'Care and Disease Management' product line. We even looked at ways how to couple single-tenant with multi-tenant, and its fairly easy to accomplish. The drawbacks for us were: - we found it to cumbersome to create custom schemas in the db through the offered table building interface - we found the ability to send outgoing messages too limiting for our needs - limited workflow capabilities, which is essential for any CDM-like solution - UI components very easy to use, but somewhat limited; WYSIWYG design tools limiting to Salesforce 'look and feel' But we found some very useful components, too, and still think enhancing healthcare specific solution with some more 'traditional' CRM functionality makes a lot of sense (given that secutiry and privacy problems are not an obstacle). Admitting, we did not spend too much time going further. If somebody has a different experience, we would be very interested to come back to the discussion."
ReplyDeletePosted by Thomas Odenwald