When we launched Salesforce Health Cloud earlier this year, we set out to create a solution that enables providers to build deeper relationships with patients by providing more complete patient information, modern collaboration and communication tools, and smarter workflows, all built on a flexible and extensible platform. We’ve already received a great response and continue to add new features every few months, based on our customer feedback and market need.

Today, we’re especially excited to announce that Health Cloud has now been included in Salesforce’s FedRAMP Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) for the Salesforce Government Cloud, meaning it meets the FedRAMP security standards required by the federal government and can now be deployed at U.S. government agencies nationwide.

This is important for a few reasons. Government agencies have long struggled with legacy IT systems that are disconnected, inflexible and expensive to maintain. In fact, agencies spent approximately $58 billion of their $79 billion IT budget in 2015 maintaining legacy systems, and 94 percent of large government IT projects from the last ten years have been unsuccessful. Salesforce Health Cloud directly addresses these issues with a modern, cloud-based platform that grows as agencies need additional users or functionality -- not based on costly, up-front software licensing costs.

Secondly, the government is the nation’s largest healthcare payer, accounting for 22% of the federal budget 2014, and that number is only growing. In fact, there were more than 55 million Medicare beneficiaries alone in 2015! Salesforce Health Cloud allows providers to manage patients in a cost-effective way, with workflows and tasks, so that government agencies can streamline the often manual or paper-driven clinical and administrative processes today.

Finally, a massive amount of patient data is being created every day, and keeping this data secure has never been more important. Health Cloud is built on Salesforce’s trusted cloud, meaning Personal Health Information (PHI), or any individually identified health information, is secure. Health Cloud is built on the same Salesforce platform that is already trusted for its security and compliance by thousands of enterprise organizations in highly regulated sectors including healthcare payors and providers, financial services and government agencies. And, with the recent addition of Salesforce Shield to Health Cloud, healthcare organizations can monitor how teams and agents access patient data at a more granular level, conduct comprehensive HIPAA audits on how data changes over time, easily encrypt data at rest and proactively protect data against suspicious use.

The healthcare and patient interactions from U.S. government agencies, like many organizations, is ripe for innovation. Salesforce Health Cloud can help modernize legacy health IT systems, quickly scale to handle a massive amount of patients and protect patient data in powerful ways. The end result is a more proactive and transparent system that creates stronger patient relationships, makes healthcare data actionable and ultimately saves taxpayer money.

We’re excited to now be able to work with these agencies and lead this movement within government.