Today, Bridge Connector announces the launch of CareService Connect on Salesforce AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise apps marketplace. The app extends the power of Salesforce Health Cloud by connecting it to large social services databases and giving care providers and case managers the power to refer directly to these organizations, reducing social determinants of health barriers at the point of care.
What happens to a patient beyond the four walls of a hospital — those health-related social needs such as lack of adequate housing, food, transportation or education — have been referred to as social determinants of health (SDoH). Sixty-eight percent of Americans suffer from at least one SDoH, according to a recent report, and of those in the high-risk category, 60 percent have never discussed these issues with their providers. SDoH factors have become important, as providers struggle to pivot from volume-based to value-based care models, where innovation has been focused on how to better treat the whole patient.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently aimed to increase competition and innovation toward addressing SDoH when, on April 1, it announced it was boosting SDoH-related reimbursements as part of its Medicare Advantage and Part D payment and policy updates. New benefits for Medicare patients include covered access to meal delivery and non-medical transportation, among other services.
“It’s the right time to address social determinants of health, and we believe some of the missing critical links for providers have been how to discuss these types of concerns with patients, then how to pair their needs with solutions, real-time, in actual care settings. The CareService Connect app can provide answers to both of these problems,” said Bridge Connector chief revenue officer, Andy Harlen.
How CareService Connect works
Once the CareService Connect app is enabled, the user can access a wide range of social services and programs to address a patient’s needs, natively, within Salesforce Health Cloud. Searchable by zip code, the app suggests social services that provide food, housing, care assistance, education, goods, work, transit and financial assistance. The provider or case manager begins the referral process with a few clicks. Once the referral case is created, Salesforce can track the status until the referral is complete, enabling care managers to more closely track the patient’s progress along the continuum of care, and closing SDoH informational gaps.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) reports that annual health care costs for readmissions within 30 days of discharge, are around $41.3 billion. And around 50 percent of those readmissions are due to social determinants of health, says Waystar in an additional report. While more hospitals, at around 88 percent, are screening for social needs, many of these initiatives are reportedly too siloed and ad-hoc, diminishing their ROI.
“Our goal is to partner with payers and health care systems so they can provide the right type of care to their patients while being efficient and cost-effective,” said Harlen. “As the healthcare industry continues to evolve in providing care for the whole person, and not just their specific disease, Bridge Connector’s CareService Connect app and other solutions make it easy for caregivers to lower their patients’ risk scores by referring and tracking their entire journey.”
Bridge Connector, the health IT company who specializes in no-code integration solutions, received the Ohana Partner Award from Salesforce in February 2019. CareService Connect is the first “Powered by Bridge” app on the Salesforce AppExchange.
“Bridge Connector’s CareService Connect is a welcomed addition to AppExchange, as it powers digital transformation for customers by extending the power of Salesforce Health Cloud,” said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to enable our partners to build cutting-edge solutions to drive customer success.”
Built on the Salesforce Platform, CareService Connect is currently available on AppExchange here, or learn more about the product here.
About Salesforce AppExchange
Salesforce AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise cloud marketplace, empowers companies to sell, service, market and engage in entirely new ways. With more than 4,000 solutions, 7 million customer installs and 80,000 peer reviews, it is the most comprehensive source of cloud, mobile, social, IoT, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies for businesses.
About Bridge Connector
Bridge Connector delivers an end-to-end suite of solutions to transform the way health care communicates. Its core integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) offering empowers health care provider organizations across the continuum of care with the ability to easily integrate traditionally disparate, mission-critical platforms such as electronic health records (EHRs) and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) without the use of code. Bridge Connector’s integration technologies help health care organizations unlock high-impact clinical and operational insights and automate workflows without the need for deep technical expertise. Bridge Connector is headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., and also has offices in San Francisco and Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
Additional Resources
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