Humana (HUM -1.45%) is building its new healthcare management technology platform with the help of cloud services provider salesforce.com (CRM -1.10%), the latter company announced in a press release yesterday. Its Salesforce Health Cloud product will undergird Humana's Enterprise Clinical Operating Model (ECOM) under a multiyear agreement between the two companies.
The exact length of the deal, its price, and other key details of the arrangement have not been made public.
ECOM is described as a "care coordination platform." According to Salesforce, when powered by its solutions, ECOM "will provide Humana's care teams with the ability to easily collaborate by offering a single, central view of each member's complete clinical history and insight into social, environmental and lifestyle factors impacting that same member's health."
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Salesforce added that it and Humana will work together to develop other next-generation solutions. This work is to be conducted at a Humana facility in Boston under the name of Healthcare Innovation Lab.
The coronavirus pandemic, and the stay-in-place measures that derive from it, has been transforming the relationship between healthcare consumer and provider. This is illustrated most starkly in the rise of telehealth companies, in which doctor visits have virtually overnight become mainly remote affairs.
With the realization that an in-person appointment often isn't necessary, we can expect this trend to continue to some degree even when the pandemic is (hopefully) over.
It is also apparent that much innovation is still needed in the means of collecting and sharing a person's health data. Many pundits have been arguing for quite some time that this is cumbersome, typically uncoordinated, and as a result often counterproductive for both patient and provider.
