Redefining Care Management Together: Lark + Salesforce

Health plans today are facing many challenges concurrently: an aging population with higher prevalence of chronic conditions, a growing provider and clinical team shortage, and a need to effectively manage increasing expenses.

Unfortunately, legacy care management approaches to mitigate these challenges have been only somewhat effective. They have received limited member traction, bandwidth constraints from care teams who have historically been able to focus only on the top 5-10% highest risk cases, and the inability to touch every member. 

Recently at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s largest conference with over 40,000 attendees, Lark’s CEO Julia Hu alongside the CCO and CHO of Salesforce Health had the opportunity to share how Salesforce and Lark are working together on the future of care management. The panel focused on current challenges and the impact of innovation in the health and technology industries. Below is a quick overview. 

A Different Approach

As the leading CRM solution in the market, Salesforce brings unparalleled expertise in enterprise workflows, automation and analytics with Health Cloud. And as the leading AI provider for the prevention and management of chronic conditions, Lark brings unique expertise in member engagement. Together, we are focused on addressing key challenges health plans face today: 

1) Personalized Member Engagement

Challenge: Payers traditionally use a one size fits all approach when it comes to member outreach - such as nurses calling members at home, often during working hours. This is a challenge in itself, even without the added layer of potentially outdated contact information. 

Opportunity: Lark is a personalized digital health coaching platform that leverages conversational AI to help members feel engaged in their health journey and empowered to manage their own health. With a decade and over $100M invested into R&D, Lark has been trained on nearly 2M users to provide hyper-personalized, dynamic and real-time coaching that keeps members coming back for more. In fact, our research shows that a majority of engagement with Lark takes place outside of normal business hours. 

2) Complete Member 360 View

Challenge: Payers often rely on historical claims data to understand member risk, which can often lag and convey only a portion of the member’s needs.

Opportunity: From day one, Lark actively captures member data through proprietary member logging (e.g food) features, member conversations, and in-app surveys. Huge data sets of passive data are collected through our remote patient monitoring platform that includes smartphone motion sensors, connected medical devices, and fitness tracker integrations. Lark also includes screeners throughout the user experience for early detection of at-risk and rising risk members - e.g SDOH, PHQ2, Medication Adherence, Gaps in Care, and more. All this rich member data is then fed back in a timely manner into Salesforce Health Cloud. Combined with other sources of data (e.g EHR), it can truly give health plans a 360* view of their members along with actionable insights for the care team. 

3) Scalability 

Challenge: Health plans often use clinical staff to perform all steps in care management, including administrative and member outreach tasks. With the rising staff shortages, this is not viable or scalable in the near future.

Opportunity: Unlike traditional person- led programs, Lark is 100x more scalable and not limited by clinical staff availability. This flexibility greatly reduces the chance of missed engagement opportunities common in traditional programs, where appointment logistics and provider availability often contribute to disengagement and gaps in care. And with seamless alerts within Health Cloud, care managers can rest assured that anyone who needs additional assistance is escalated to them. This helps ensure that the clinical team can focus on the most urgent and complex cases, and that they are working at the top of their license. 

Opportunities Ahead

While Care Management has historically focused on reaching the sickest members and on avoiding serious complications, it should be broadened to include members with rising risk and to healthy members, so the entire population feels engaged and enabled. Doing so will help improve member experience, health outcomes and productivity, and eventually drive value to the health plan. 

If you’re curious how Lark and Salesforce can help further optimize your care management process, reach out to larkforsalesforce@lark.com