Salesforce Launches AI Tools For Doctors, Healthcare Sector

Salesforce is looking to doctors and the healthcare sector, by launching new AI tools to ease their workloads.

The San Francisco-based CRM giant announced ‘Einstein Copilot: Health Actions’, which is designed to automate some of the manual administrative tasks to ease the burdensome administrative workloads of doctors and healthcare professionals.

The arrival of these AI tools for the healthcare sector comes after Salesforce again reduced its workforce in January (with the loss of 700 staff), after a sizeable workforce reduction in 2023 (10,000 job losses).

Einstein Copilot: Health Actions

Now Salesforce has launched Einstein Copilot: Health Actions, which is a conversational AI assistant that will allow doctors to book appointments, summarise patient information, and send referrals.

Two other solutions called ‘Assessment Generation’, and ‘Data Cloud for Health’ help automate and streamline clinical summaries, deliver more personalised communication, and help compile tailored patient assessments faster for care teams, all from a single platform.

These new innovations are powered by Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, which health organisations can use to gather medical data from disparate sources, such as insurance claims systems and electronic health records, into one place.

These new healthcare AI solutions comes after it has been discovered that nearly a quarter of US healthcare spending is wasted on administrative costs, presenting a potential cost savings of up to $320 billion for healthcare organisations, according to McKinsey and Co.

Conversational AI

The idea behind Einstein Copilot: Health Actions is that the AI solution will use conversational AI to trigger workflows that send referrals, book appointments, revise care plans, and more.

It will allow qualified healthcare professionals to use natural language prompts to capture and summarise patient or partner details from different clinical and non-clinical sources, easily update patient and member information, and automate outreach.

For example, a provider can use Einstein Copilot to create a patient summary, including medications, diagnoses, social determinants, assessments, clinical service requests, and care gaps.

A care manager can also ask Einstein Copilot to help find an in-network provider for their patient based on preferred location, speciality, and insurance coverage, and then auto-populate an electronic referral form using natural language prompts, embedded within the flow of their work.

Einstein Copilot can generate interaction summaries for the care co-ordinator, which can be sent to the patient as well as any new primary care provider, and are easily added to records in the system.

Easing workload burden

Meanwhile ‘Assessment Generation’ will let healthcare organisations digitise health assessments and automatically upload the information directly into Salesforce Health Cloud.

“These new data, AI, and CRM features help reduce the administrative and operational burden for healthcare providers and care teams, leading to better outcomes for their patients,” said Amit Khanna, SVP & GM for Health at Salesforce.

“And with Salesforce’s trusted AI, healthcare organisations excited about generative AI – but nervous about clinical and security concerns – can confidently use these innovations in their everyday workflows,” Khanna concluded.

Salesforce’s Data Cloud for Health and Tableau Pulse are generally available today.

The Assessment Generation will be generally available beginning in summer 2024, while Einstein Copilot is expected to be HIPAA-compliant by summer 2024.