The TruSummit Solutions team attended ViVE 2024 in Los Angeles and … you guys …  

They had a puppy park.  
 
Yes, among some of the best swag I’ve ever seen at a conference was the puppy park sponsored by UCLA. And while you obviously couldn’t take a puppy home with you, elsewhere in the exhibit hall you could grab swag including Nike Dunk sneakers and light up sunglasses or try your hand at an arcade-style claw machine.   

And even more impressive than the puppy park and exhibit hall swag was the four-day conference itself. ViVE 2024 was laser-focused on the current state of healthcare and how to use technology to break down data siloes and create better care pathways for patients. I walked away from the conference chewing on these topics, and how Salesforce might help:    

Removing the Burden of Care Management from the Patient

• Patients shouldn’t need to carry the burden of gathering files and data about their health. This often occurs due to the disconnected nature of apps required for care management. 
• In an ideal world, a patient will be able to access aggregated data about their personal care so in the event they are seeing a new doctor or specialist, they can easily share the information quickly via a QR code or single interface, for example. 

The Possible Salesforce Solve: Give the patient direct portal access to things like lab results and care details, as well as self-service access to a knowledge base and educational materials. Leveraging a portal like Salesforce Experience Cloud enables the delivery of intelligent experiences to improve care access and build trust with patients. Providers are also often incentivized to get patients to interact via portals. It’s a win-win! 

Simplifying the Provider Experience

To put it simply, the provider experience needs some love. From documentation to EHRs to siloed systems, a massive shift and simplification of the provider experience is needed.  

• Very commonly, the act of capturing transactional clinical details occurs primarily for billing purposes due to the overwhelm and busy schedules of providers. Instead, we need to shift towards documentation in the form of care plans for the patient to help them understand what they need to stay healthy. 
• EHRs are very clunky and difficult to use. The ‘file-based’ experience creates delays at the beginning and end of a patient’s appointment. EHRs also lack clinical intelligence or next best action insights.  
• Additionally, the disconnected nature of the various applications required for care management creates an even more disjointed experience for providers and patients.  

The Possible Salesforce Solve: Focus on innovative ways to reduce screen clutter and decrease the number of applications providers are required to use every day. Break down data siloes and unify systems to have a consolidated data set of clinical and non-clinical data all in one place. Also, invest in a platform with built-in intelligence and next best action insights. (Hint, Salesforce Health Cloud integrated with your EHR.) 

AI: It Only Works When You Feed It Healthy Data  

• Healthcare organizations are jumping on the AI bandwagon, and often want AI capabilities sooner than they’re fully baked. 
• Standalone tools are being acquired without an appropriate data strategy to fully take advantage of the tool’s capabilities.
• A mastered, clean data set is necessary; this needs to be addressed first.   

The Possible Salesforce Solve: Begin by establishing a foundational data layer to be consumed. Then, through iterative use, consider the introduction and monitoring of AI tool usage. A further enhancement may be implementing a data fabric layer to enhance data consumption capabilities. (And of course Salesforce’s focus on AI can help you get there faster.)  

Conferences are tough – you are spending a lot of time and money and you want to feel like you’re getting maximum value for your investment. With the ViVE Conference, I definitely feel that our team got that value. The sessions were educational and most everyone seemed very open to networking. We are planning to attend again next year and have already begun follow-up conversations with new contacts to establish new networking relationships and potential partnerships. 

Want to pick Jordan’s brain on the ViVE Conference, Salesforce for healthcare, or cute puppies? You know where to find TruSummit Solutions.  

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For many, the turn of the calendar into a new year signals a chance for new beginnings and a fresh start. For me, it holds even more significance; four years ago on January 1, I took the massive step of hanging my own shingle and starting TruSummit Solutions.  

I leaped into entrepreneurship and into launching my own Salesforce implementation firm because I believe that Salesforce has extraordinary power as a core enterprise application and that organizations deserve a Salesforce partner who listens to their unique challenges and objectives and engages not only to implement metrics-based solutions but also to enable and empower the organization to own its application moving forward.  

I’ve been heartened by the reception my firm and approach has received and am exceedingly proud of the results we’ve delivered. We’ve experienced rapid and significant growth over the past four years and are now nearing approximately 40 employees across the country who are implementing and optimizing Salesforce for global manufacturers, enterprise healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and more.  

I’ve also learned innumerable lessons along the way about being an entrepreneur, running a business, building and leading a team, and delivering success for clients. As I reflect on the past four years, I’m sharing four – actually, make that five! — lessons I’ve learned along the way:  

1. Hire for Your Gaps: The Importance of Team Dynamics 
   I think team dynamics are arguably the most important consideration of building a company. The team makeup is so incredibly important, and one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. Every person I hire is an essential addition to the team, no matter how big or small their role may seem. If you find someone who is as good as you or better than you, embrace them, and let them influence. Hire for your own gaps or inadequacies.  
   
   A good team is diverse, and well rounded. If everybody looks and thinks the same, you’re doing it wrong. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the same core values; rather it means you need different perspectives and life experiences at the table.  

2. Keep Showing Up  
   It’s never going to get easier. Once you get comfortable with that fact, the sooner you’ll be able to learn how to enjoy the process and lead others to do the same. As soon as you think you’ve surmounted the latest challenge, there’s another one around the corner. Embracing this is necessary.  

3. Innovation Is a Must 
   Refusing to change or adapt to changing circumstances is a sure-fire way to fail. Each year that we’ve been in business, we’ve had to pivot, evolve, and innovate – sometimes in response to client needs, sometimes in response to changing market conditions. Evolution and innovation drove the start of our Managed Services business in 2022; it’s at the heart of our product development roadmap for Salesforce accelerators in 2024.  
   
   One of the most exciting things about our innovation is that it helps drive our clients’ innovation, as well. If we can build products and capabilities that are needed every time an implementation takes place, we’re essentially accelerating our clients’ speed to market, helping them engage more quickly with their customers and partners and further accelerating their business outcomes.  

4. Don’t Try to Boil the Ocean 
   Start small and be willing to build and iterate over time. (See my note above about innovation and change and adapting to change.) If you wait for conditions to be perfect to start something new or change something that isn’t working, you’ll be waiting forever.  

5. Be Decisive  
   What ifs, could haves, should haves … these can and will consume all your mental energy. Pick a direction, be decisive, and move on. Learn from your decisions and apply those lessons to the next experience. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision.  

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