Health Cloud Administration
jTypes 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.
There are two ways to model people in Health Cloud: the person account model and the traditional account-contact model.
- Person account model
- A person account record combines fields from a contact and an account to represent a person. In Health Cloud you see one consolidated record with information from the account and contact records. But behind the scenes, it’s actually fields from the Account and Contact objects that are linked, representing a single person. In this model, a person doesn’t have to be associated with an organization.
- Traditional account-contact model
- If you’ve worked with any other cloud 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 StayHealthy MedTech Company. His contact record is related to the business account for StayHealthy MedTech Company.
Let’s look at Charles Green. Charles is suffering from flu, and has been in home isolation with his wife, Shawna Green, who’s also his caregiver. His primary care physician, Dr. Rukmini Mondal, has been monitoring his health. Let’s see how each of these people is represented in Health Cloud.
- Patients or Members
- A patient or member is represented with a person account. Health Cloud doesn’t represent
patients as contacts. Instead, patients or members are shown as person accounts representing a
single person. So Charles Green, our patient in Health Cloud, has a person account. His account
and contact information are combined and presented as a single record.
- Providers
- When you model a provider, you must represent them both as a provider and as an organization
or person. To represent your providers in terms of what they do, you use the Healthcare
Provider object. To represent providers as organizations or people, you use the Account or
Contact objects as needed.
- To represent Dr. Rukmini Mondal, we create a Person Account or Contact record that represents the person Rukmini Mondal and a Healthcare Provider record that represents the doctor Rukmini Mondal. Then we reference her Person Account or Contact record in her Healthcare Provider record.
- To represent the StayHealthy organization, create a Business Account record and a Healthcare Provider record for it. Then reference the business account record in the Healthcare Provider record using its Account field.
- 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. You can connect the business account of the local branch to the business account of the parent organization using the Parent Account field on the local branch’s account record.
- 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.