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Home health care provider KinCare and Johns Hopkins Healthcare have been utilizing Salesforce to help with care coordination, improving customer service and reducing costs.
KinCare is Australia’s largest home healthcare provider, serving 10,000 customers with 2,000 staff, most of whom are casual employees, called to work on an as-needed basis. The company provides more than 44,000 home visits every two weeks.
KinCare has to balance the clients who want the best possible care, employees who want sustainable income, government payers’ desire for cost savings, and the company’s need to continue increasing profit. “Care coordination is a key activity within KinCare,” Chief Investment Officer Jerome Barrientos told a packed audience at Dreamforce. “It’s easy when you’re small. You remember all your customers, you remember all your employees.”
Barrientos identified three steps to build a scalable care coordination system, in order to create a great customer service experience:
Using ClickSoftware running on a Salesforce1 platform, KinCare has drastically changed the workflow for employees and clients. Instead of a 30-page intake form that could take several days to enter into the office system, assessors now input the data directly into an iPad and immediately create a client profile.
“We are one of the few organizations that can actually provide the service on the same day,” Barrientos said.
Most customer communication still takes place over the phone, but KinCare also offers a portal where clients and their families can see what services are available. Using an interface through their television, customers can engage with KinCare through video conferencing.
Field staff use a portal to log their visits, allowing care coordinators to spot problems with staffing and client visits. The mobile portal not only allows customer data to be updated quickly, but staff time is entered automatically as well, streamlining the payroll process.
“Processes that used to take 10 days happen in less than a minute today,” Barrientos reported. “I believe that the challenges we face in Australia are very similar to the challenges we face in the United States,” he noted.
And Maryann Corkran, Vice President of Information Systems at Johns Hopkins Healthcare LLC, pointed to some of the same challenges when she spoke at Dreamforce about how Johns Hopkins is using Salesforce as their system of engagement for delivering coordinated care.
“One of the things we believe at Hopkins Medicine is that everything is about the patient,” she said. “The patient needs to be at the center.”
One percent of the population accounts for 22% of healthcare spending, Corkran noted. Among Medicaid recipients, 54% of spending goes to care for just 5% of patients. “It’s not rocket science to understand, if you need to reduce your costs, where you need to focus your attention,” she said.
The Johns Hopkins Community Health Partnership, with a grant from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is working to keep patients well and out of emergency rooms. Enhanced services like community health workers help high-risk patients with the factors that influence health outcomes outside the doctor’s office. Corkran reported that 80% of the factors affecting health in the communities they serve are social, behavioral or environmental.
Salesforce allowed health workers to get data into the system quickly and helped engage patients in creating and implementing their own care plan. The platform also allowed the program to coordinate the schedules of care workers who work out in the community.
By one measure, the returns on the Hopkins program are undeniable: patient satisfaction and health outcomes have improved. In healthcare, it doesn’t get better than that.
If you missed hearing Maryann Corkran at Dreamforce this year, please join us today in New York at the Salesforce World Tour where you can hear about the Hopkins story firsthand. Register now!
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