Salesforce Debuts Commerce Cloud for Healthcare Field

Salesforce has rolled out a version of its Commerce Cloud for the healthcare field.

The HIPAA-compliant platform, announced in a Wednesday (April 12) press release, is designed to streamline healthcare commerce experiences while reducing costs.

“As the healthcare industry’s digital transformation continues, organizations that don’t offer online commerce channels run the risk of losing both customers and revenue to their competition,” the company said in the release.

The new features will let healthcare and life sciences organizations sell directly to their customers, automate B2B sales, and improve service through streamlined order support, according to the release.

The platform offers companies the ability to set up new storefronts. That way, for example, a medical device firm that normally sells using distributors “can easily set up a single storefront for both direct-to-patient and B2B ordering” thus speeding time to value while lowering maintenance costs, per the release.

With Commerce Cloud’s reordering features, a pharmaceutical company could provide pharmacies with a simpler re-ordering portal for prescription and over-the-counter medicines, thus automating sales and decreasing order time for customers, the release stated.

“In today’s evolving healthcare landscape, companies must find ways to lower their cost to serve patients while continuing to improve patient and provider experiences,” Michael Affronti, senior vice president and general manager of Commerce Cloud, said in the release. “With Commerce Cloud benefitting from platform capabilities like Data Cloud and [artificial intelligence (AI)], healthcare organizations can embed personalized commerce opportunities into every touch point and leverage automation to reduce operational costs.”

The healthcare field could be the sector that stands to benefit most from advances in AI.

“That’s because healthcare organizations are sitting on a treasure trove of information in the form of health records and images, population data, historical claims data, clinical trial data, and more,” according to PYMNTS. “The deep learning capabilities of modern AI have reached the technical tipping point where today’s algorithms can offer healthcare organizations the attractive proposition of helping them make better business decisions, shape better clinical outcomes, and more broadly speaking, improve patient care and delivery experience.”

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS has shown that consumers want to see more digitization in their healthcare interaction.

For example, 92% of patients who faced problems while paying healthcare expenses were at least somewhat interested in a unified digital platform for their healthcare needs, according to “Healthcare in the Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms as Key to Better Health,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration.