The era of precision health care is upon us, according to Dr. Joshua Newman, CEO of Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences — and it has arrived in the form of cloud-based patient relationship management.

By gathering data from EMRs, medical devices and wearables, Salesforce Health Cloud aims to provide physicians with a complete view of their patients. The information is presented in Health Cloud’s timeline view, which shows the progression of a patient’s health journey.

Just like the rest of the industry, health care IT is focusing more on patient experience. In addition, the reimbursement now hinges on outcomes and physicians are pressured to provide more comprehensive care and compete for patients.

In February's edition of HCB News, we reported that some physicians are concerned about the vast amount of data that the wearable technologies generate. But platforms like Salesforce Health Cloud get all of that information to the physicians in a more organized way.

Health Cloud alerts caregivers when a patient missed an appointment or needed to refill their medications. They can also set reminders for patients with high-blood pressure in order to schedule regular check-ins.

Health Cloud also features something called Private Communities, which allows care coordinators to work together and allocate tasks across a patient’s caregiver network. Through that feature, the patients can view progress against a care plan, find answers quickly to common questions and connect with any provider in their network.

Precision medicine involves more personalized treatment for cancer and other diseases but precision health care is when physicians develop more meaningful, accurate and long-term relationships with their patients.

Health Cloud will be available for sale in February 2016.

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