Types of People in Health Cloud

At its core, healthcare is focused on patients or members. But every patient or member is surrounded by a team of people who support them. Health Cloud provides a 360-degree view of the patient or member that includes their primary care physician, additional care team members such as physical therapists and family members, and even medical supply companies.

If you have experience working in Salesforce, you’re familiar with the traditional account-contact model. In this model, accounts represent organizations, and contacts represent people. A contact exists only in relation to an account. For example, Eric Pérez is a sales rep at a MedTech organization. His contact record is related to the business account record for that organization.

Because most healthcare organizations don’t consider their patients or members in the context of an organization, Health Cloud uses person accounts to represent a healthcare patient or member.

A person account record combines an account and a contact to represent a person without the need to relate that person to an organization. Person accounts store information that applies to human beings rather than organizations, such as a first name and a last name, title, address, and date of birth.

In Health Cloud, always model your patients or members as person accounts. You can’t fully use Health Cloud functionality if you don’t model your patients and members as person accounts. A single person account record represents the same patient and member.

Let’s look at Charles Green. Charles is suffering from flu, and has been in isolation at home with his wife, Shawna Green, who’s acting as his caregiver for the duration of his illness. His primary care physician, Dr. Rukmini Mondal, has been monitoring his health. Dr Mondal works for StayHealthy healthcare providers. Let’s see how each of these people and organizations are represented in Health Cloud.

Patients or Members

Because Health Cloud represents a patient or member with a person account, create a person account for Charles. This single record combines his account and contact details.

Providers

When you model healthcare providers in Health Cloud, represent them as a person or an organization, and represent what they do.

To represent providers as organizations, use the Account object with a Business record type.

To represent providers as people, use person accounts or contacts, but we strongly recommend person accounts. Person accounts are a better fit for healthcare providers who are their own independent entity with practicing rights at a number of locations. These individuals have their own unique identification number, such as a National Provider Identifier (NPI), which follows them regardless of where they work. If you map individual providers as contacts, there are limited capabilities for these records.

To represent providers in terms of what they do, you use the Healthcare Provider object.

• To represent Dr. Rukmini Mondal, create a person account record that represents the person Rukmini Mondal and create a healthcare provider record that represents the doctor Rukmini Mondal. In her healthcare provider record, reference her contact record in the Practitioner field and leave the Account field empty.
• To represent the StayHealthy organization, create a business account record to represent them as an organization and a healthcare provider record to represent what the organization does. Reference the business account record in the Account field of the healthcare provider record.
• Local branches or facilities of providers also need healthcare facility records that reference a business account for that specific branch or facility. For instance, to represent the Santa Fe branch of StayHealthy, create a business account record, a healthcare provider record, and a healthcare facility record for the Santa Fe branch. Reference the business account record from both the healthcare provider and healthcare facility records. Use the Parent Account field on the local branch’s account record to relate the business account of the local branch to the business account of the parent organization.
• To represent Dr. Rukmini Mondal working at the StayHealthy branch at Santa Fe, create a healthcare practitioner facility record that references Rukmini’s healthcare provider record, the Santa Fe branch’s healthcare facility record, and the Santa Fe branch’s business account record.

Everyone else in Health Cloud

For all other people represented in the org, such as caregivers, we recommend that you use person accounts. This is because it’s important to plan ahead while structuring people entities. For example, what if a caregiver like Shawna Green, who has been caring for Charles Green, catches the flu and becomes a patient herself? When caregivers are already set up as person accounts, it’s easy to change or add roles.