Salesforce Inc. said today it’s expanding into the life sciences industry with the launch of a new cloud platform that can help medical technology providers and pharmaceutical companies engage with patients and healthcare professionals and organizations in a more personalized way.

The Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud platform is generally available today and comes with a heavy dose of artificial intelligence capabilities, which can help to streamline clinical processes and operations, the company added. It leverages the Einstein 1 Platform, which integrates generative AI, to create a powerful AI system that connects to, and obtains insights from, every aspect of an organization’s data.

Salesforce said one of the main benefits of Life Sciences Cloud, available now, is to streamline clinical trials, including the recruitment and enrollment processes involved with them. It can help organizations to identify the most qualified, diverse candidates for clinical trials and automate the recruitment process by matching patients according to their defined prescreening and eligibility criteria. In this way it can significantly reduce the time it takes to screen and assess candidates, which is something that has traditionally been done manually.

The platform will enable organizations to quickly create and publish an online portal for each clinical trial, making it easy for eligible patients to find trials that may be beneficial to them. Additionally, it can simplify the patient enrollment process by creating customized e-consent forms.

Customers will be able to ask Einstein Copilot, a generative AI assistant, to generate a segment of patients that live within 20 miles of a clinical trial site, using data from sources such as spreadsheets, medical networks and electronic health records. Once suitable candidates have been identified, Einstein Copilot can then reach out to those individuals to see if they’re interested in participating in the trial.

According to Salesforce, this is likely to go down well with organizations that perform clinical trials, as candidate recruitment is a lengthy process that can take weeks to finish. Finding qualified candidates is a real headache, and the company points out that more than 80% of clinical trials end up going ahead without the full complement of patients required by the drug developers.

Moreover, many clinical trials overrun their timelines, because ensuring that participants continue with the therapy is difficult. According to one study, more than 40% of participants in a clinical trial stopped taking their medicine within the first year.

It’s not only clinical trials where Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud can be helpful. Another key feature is its patient benefits verification tool, available as a pilot feature now, which can help organizations to quickly determine the out-of-pocket costs of pharmaceuticals and other treatments, and determine which patients are eligible for financial assistance, helping to broaden accessibility to medical treatments.

The tool integrates with Einstein Copilot, which can help to perform re-verifications in bulk whenever they’re required. So if a diabetes patient requires a new prior authorization every six months, it can alert operators to re-verify that individual’s insulin and glucometer copays to ensure continuity of their treatments.

The platform’s patient program outcome management module, also in pilot, helps service teams and coordinators to capture and automate the impact of their educational and support programs. It can also help to automate the engagement process, for instance by sending reminders to patients to keep taking their medication. Users will be able to analyze which engagement strategies are the most effective, in order to reduce treatment drop-off rates.

Of course, the platform also provides comprehensive data analytics capabilities, tapping into Salesforce Data Cloud and MuleSoft for Life Sciences to offer a more complete and harmonized view of each patient and healthcare provider. It can grab both structured data from databases, and unstructured information, such as emails, call transcripts, meeting notes, scientific publications and more, connect these to a common data model and then build a unified profile for each patient. Using these profiles, companies can then deliver more personalized interactions

Frank Defesche, senior vice president and general manager of life sciences at Salesforce, said the industry is grappling with challenges around the rising costs of drugs, frustrated doctors and confused patients, not to mention increased regulatory scrutiny.

“AI opens the door for pharma and medical tech organizations to reimagine their operations processes, while promoting a focus on patients,” he said. “Life sciences organizations will be able to make the best use of their data quickly, while automating administrative tasks and identifying potential risks in real time.”

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