Many hospitals and health systems offer global medical services to patients from other countries. If a U.S. healthcare provider addresses just a small segment of the international healthcare market, it represents significant new opportunities for patient care.
The appeal to international patients and their families coming to the U.S. is that they can access a higher quality of care than in their home country.
When a patient with a medical condition travels to a foreign country like the U.S. for diagnosis and treatment, it’s crucial that they feel welcome and at ease—especially pediatric patients. For this reason, health systems that provide global medical services often offer patient concierge services.
Concierge services can include:
- Setting up a patient’s medical appointments
- Assisting with the visa application process
- Recommending or booking travel accommodations and lodging
- Ensuring that religious and cultural needs are met
Managing a global services practice requires tracking patient information, travel, appointments, diagnosis, treatment, payment, and more. Hospitals and health systems have used various legacy software systems to manage this information. However, these systems are often less than efficient platforms for managing global services.
In this article, we break down why Salesforce Health Cloud is the most efficient solution to power your health system’s global medical services.
Salesforce Health Cloud for Global Medical Services
Deploying a purpose-built solution like Salesforce Health Cloud will ensure more consistent patient information capture and access. We recommend Salesforce Health Cloud here as it is the best platform for patient data management and associated workflows.
For global services to be offered, implementation teams must design a global medical services management platform for different user groups. These user groups include intake coordinators, clinical coordinators, and administrative coordinators. In addition, physicians and other clinicians may need direct access to the system.
Here are some of the areas of functionality that a system can address.
The Patient Journey
In a system designed to manage global patient services, it should be easy to track each patient’s journey through stages similar to the following.
- Awareness of Services
- Initial Request
- Case review
- Pre-arrival preparation
- Treatment
- Repatriation
- Close the current process
System users can advance the patient’s stage in the journey with the click of a button. Validation rules can require specific updates to the patient record before the patient’s stage is advanced.
EHR Integration
It is essential to display specific data from a patient’s clinical record in a global services platform. The system implementation should include EHR integration so users can see a patient’s clinical appointments and past encounters.
When a user adds a new patient to Health Cloud, the integration can add a patient’s basic information to EHR as a new patient record.
Managing New Requests
A health system that offers global medical services can streamline the new patient request process by adding an online form to its website. A form replaces the less efficient back and forth of PDF request documents.
The online form can gather initial information about the patient, their current diagnosis, medical history, and surgical history. Also, when a physician refers an international patient, the form can capture the referring doctor’s information up-front.
For marketing purposes, the form can include a field that asks, “how did you hear about us?” This field enables marketers to determine which sources of new patient requests are working best — and which marketing sources may require more attention.
A Patient Portal
Once a hospital approves a new patient for care, the patient or their legal guardian can be issued credentials for the Salesforce Experience Cloud.
In Healthcare, Experience Cloud is an advanced form of a patient portal that increases patient engagement.
Payments and Insurance
In the absence of an upfront cash deposit, medical services usually cannot proceed without a letter of guarantee (LOG). The LOG is an assurance of payment by an insurer for the portion of the patient’s hospital bill that insurance will cover.
A letter of guarantee is specific to a medical service and a timeframe. Each LOG moves through a series of steps, from pending requests to approved or denied.
In the Salesforce Health Cloud interface, users can track each LOG and where the letter is in the process. A copy of each letter can be dragged and dropped onto the LOG section of the patient record.
System User Adoption
For maximum user adoption of any new software system, staff should experience continuity from the old to the new system. For example, if a legacy system presented information in a particular on-screen format, replicating that layout in a new system gives users a sense of familiarity.
The job of the implementation team is to introduce new functionality while preserving elements of existing functionality.
J2 Interactive’s Salesforce services team implements Health Cloud in a way that gives employees the best possible user experience. A great user experience, in turn, allows employees to provide high-quality service to international patients.
