When Salesforce, already a powerhouse in customer support systems, entered the healthcare space in 2015, the company's scale and experience held a lot of promise for tackling large-scale population health challenges. Now, in a collaboration with Mount Sinai Health System in New York, Salesforce will help manage population data on more than 350,000 Medicaid beneficiaries.

Mount Sinai is using Salesforce’s CRM platform to coordinate and manage care of Medicaid members within its Performing Provider System, which was formed in 2015 along with the overhaul of Medicaid. The Mount Sinai PPS covers more than 350,000 Medicaid members across the New York Metro area, and the collaboration with Salesforce will allow the health system to connect every provider and organization across the ecosystem and easily transfer information between each in order to better understand patient needs and provide personalized care.

"With Salesforce, Mount Sinai is arming thousands of Medicaid providers and community organizations with a more precise view of the demographics, lifestyle and health histories of patients," Dr. Joshua Newman, chief medical officer at Salesforce, said in a statement. "As a result, they'll be able to collaborate more closely and put their patients at the center of care."

Mount Sinai PPS is a separate legal entity from Mount Sinai Health System focused on decreasing hospital utilization by 25 percent over five years for the most vulnerable populations in New York. To do this, the program leverages a variety of community health services including 10,000 Medicaid service providers and 200 community organizations, encompassing large area hospitals, private medical practices, nursing homes and substance abuse treatment centers, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, housing agencies and faith-based service groups. 

These medical groups and community organizations don't normally communicate with each other, so each of them usually only sees a piece of the puzzle when it comes to a person's health. With the Salesforce Health Cloud and Community Cloud, a patient's doctor and social worker, for instance, can share information that will help them support the patient and keep them out of the hospital.

"Too often, we see patients delay their care and end up in the emergency room, which is both difficult for the patient and costly for taxpayers," Kash Patel, VP of the IT Department at Mount Sinai, said in a statement. "With the right technology, in the hands of the right people, we can break this cycle and help Medicaid patients get quality care, while reducing high-cost and avoidable emergency room visits."