Salesforce Reportedly Working to Create $1 Billion Healthcare Business

That’s the news as reported by Reuters in late October. The article talks about Salesforce’s interest in creating a healthcare business and believe it can reach $1 billion in revenue. The article also highlights how SalesForce has recently hired over a dozen people from the healthcare and medical device sectors.

Plus, they even talk about the roll out of the CareWeb Messenger product that is built on the top of Salesforce’s technology:

The University of California at San Francisco, for instance, rolled out CareWeb Messenger, built on top of Salesforce’s technology, through which doctors, nurses and patients talk online and on mobile devices. UCSF and Salesforce have close ties: in April, CEO Marc Benioff donated $100 million to its children’s hospital.

I’ll be interested to see how this first product plays out. It actually fits into Salesforce’s core competencies quite well. Although, the secure healthcare messaging space is a crowded one. With that said, I was invited to a Salesforce event to talk about healthcare. Unfortunately, the timing was bad so I couldn’t make it, but now I’m particularly interested in what was said at the event.

It seems that sooner or later, all of the big tech companies come after healthcare. We’ve seen the same with Google, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Samsung, and many more. While it must be incredibly enticing for these companies to come after a trillion dollar market like healthcare, most of these companies come into healthcare with an amazing amount of naivety as to the complexities of healthcare. Once they get in, they find these complexities and change their mind. We’ll see if Salesforce does something similar.

With that said, Salesforce has the money, the platform and the connections to do something in healthcare. Plus, I welcome fresh ideas and perspectives from companies like Salesforce in healthcare. I think that we all agree that there’s a huge opportunity for technology to improve healthcare. I want as many people working on finding those solutions as possible. Doesn’t hurt to have a multi-billion dollar company taking an interest in it as well.

What do you think of Salesforce’s entrance into healthcare? Will they be a major player? Where do you think it makes sense for them to focus their efforts?

Some of the articles on this talk about Salesforce building an EHR or things like that. Given the regulations and the environment, I never see that happening. Although, with the money they have available to them, maybe they’ll surprise us all.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Right on about naivety on complexity John. Eligibility and enrollment is not so simple – especially change transactions.

    Obviously leverage their CRM capabilities to capture customer loyalty.Prolly help capture and forward quantified self data.

    Integrate with core “claims admin systems” by passing 834’s – make it easy for health plans.

    Improve “change and termination” processing and pass that data “correctly” via 834’s (not a trivial matter).

    Reach out to brokers/agents.

    Allow customers to do the heavy lifting on data capture and pass that to downstream consumers: healthplans, 3rd party clinical providers, etc.

    Bi-directional, Bi-directional, Bi-directional,

  • One thing most of these companies miss is that to truly move the market, they need to cooperate with others on all the aspects of healthcare. Setting up more silos is not going to cut it. I propose a model I call a patient “data custodian”, an entity contracted by the patient to manage storage, privacy and retrieval of PHI for the patient’s benefit. This model would allow sharing of patient data between all players in a patient’s healthcare plan. This would allow companies like Salesforce to offer a front end, say an EHR, without some of work managing the regulatory restrictions. Access to a 360 view of the patient would make their offerings more effective and thereby more profitable.

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