Join us for the recap of this insightful virtual session: “Automating Patient Recruitment with Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud!”

Brace yourself for an insightful session with the Salesforce and the Life Sciences Group, as we explore how Clinical Research Organizations (CROs) are revolutionizing patient recruitment with Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud!

Discover how to overcome the challenges of disparate data and manual processes that many CROs face. Our expert speakers, Magon Mair, Hari Krishnan, and Jubin Kamdar, will guide you through a common use case and design that automates processes, provides a comprehensive Candidate 360, and accelerates screening times for patient recruiters. Whether you’re in clinical research or looking to streamline your processes, this session is your chance to learn from the best!

Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video!

SPEAKERS:

Magon Mair

Hari Krishnan 

Jubin Kamdar

Shannon J. Gregg

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, everybody! I can’t believe we are in August, but we are, Summer is rolling down to an end. We’re getting close to back to school, and I am excited today in the Salesforce and Life Sciences group to introduce you to a topic that I personally have been like waiting for!

I’ve been like, yes, I can’t wait until this day. Automating patient recruitment with Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud. So when Magon first came to me with this idea, I was like, heck yeah, let’s go, and she was like, okay, we wanna do it in August. I was like, oh, I wanna see it right away!

So I know that you guys have been just as excited as I have for this topic, which is pushing the boundaries of Salesforce innovation inside of. An area in the life sciences that I think is ripe for innovation. So I am not going to waste any more of Megan’s time. I’m gonna hand it over to her so she can introduce herself and get started.

Hi everybody, my name is Magon Mair and I work for a summit level partner with Salesforce, which is Wilco Source. We are a CS Tech company. I’ve been in the Salesforce space for about 15 years, and then with healthcare specifically. For five years. So the company I work for Wilco Source, we are 100% Salesforce. We’re 100% healthcare life sciences. And that kind of brought us here to Life Sciences Cloud, which we are one of the Salesforce migration partners.

So we’re like how are we gonna do this right? Because it’s new. There’s not a lot of trailhead content out there right now. There’s not a lot of webinars out there right now. There’s not a certification ready for us. So what do we do? So we actually made ourselves customer zero. We bought Life Sciences Cloud, even though we don’t use it in our day-to-day business, but for us to learn and get our hands on. And I have here with me Jubin I’ll let him introduce himself.

He is one of the people who’s helped leading the charge and coming up with this innovation with myself and by himself. To help solve these problems that we see for our clients. And we’re just finding that a lot of manual processes exist still in CROs for recruitment, and we’re seeing a lot of the same use case over and over. Reached out to Shannon as she’s leading this group and has been leading life sciences so far in this space and thought, Hey, let’s share some of the knowledge so ju but I’ll pass it to you to introduce yourself.

Hi guys! First of all, can you all hear me? Yep. Okay. Hi guys, my name is Jubin, I work as a business analyst or Salesforce administrator for WorkSource, a CS tech company. I work majorly within the healthcare and life sciences domain.

So this is where we are today and today we are very excited to show you guys how we are automating patient recruitment with Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud. So I’ll just take a quick snippet just to give you guys, set the stage and then Jin’s gonna share a screen and he’ll do a demo.

 So what we are finding is that there’s a lot of disparate data, meaning that you know right now. What was that?

Okay. I’ll go ahead and continue. So what we’re finding, there’s a lot of disparate data. People are, the clinical research organizations are marketing in different places social media campaigns maybe television and whatnot, and then they wanna get that form filled in, not necessarily all the time.

Is that form automatically going into a CRM? There’s a lot of swivel chair. Sometimes there’s not a phone integration with CTI. Sometimes you can sends not connected. Sometimes the emails aren’t connected. Text messaging may or may not be present and may or may not be bidirectional. And it’s just, it’s really hard, right?

People are very valuable, very knowledgeable, that are doing recruitment, but the times being spent on manual tasks rather than pushing these trials along. So with some of this automation, we’re hoping to, offload some of that work from those individuals and get the, get it so that, to a point where.

Everybody’s getting through the clinical trials faster ’cause we’re able to put more people, schedule more people for visits. Ju I’ll let you go ahead and take over and share and explain what we’ve built thus far in our own org. Yeah. Today, all the watches move through the system in real time from sponsor configuring the study to pay to participant, finding it on the portal to recruiters, coordinators and investigators completing each step.

So I’ll call out the previous pain point with which traditional clinical trial management systems phase and show exactly how we solve it. So I’ll just go ahead and share my screen.

Oh, is my screen visible to all of you? Yep. Okay. So let’s assume that there was a new clinical trial being raised and everything. The approval was being okay. Approval has we have the approval for the clinical trial. What next? So when a sponsor logs into the Salesforce or a study designer, they can create a care program in the system.

So basically this opens up where they can enter a phase, they can enter an indication to target enrollment. What are the study arms? The study visits and procedures for each clinical trial. So this is where the clinical trial gets created. And next we’ll show you. When you go to a related list, we can see all the clinic, all the study arms for the particular clinical trial, it could be a arm for a placebo, it could be like a active arm, it could be a controlled group for a specific group.

So we can just mention all of those over here. Each study arm will have, will now have certain study visits associated with them. So let me just go to. And we can see all the study visits. So this might look like a lot to configure initially, but this is something that once it is configured, it goes for all the participants that would be registering for this clinical trials.

So once a care program or a clinical trial has been configured fully, the study designer can publish it to the site. When once they click on this quick action, the trial gets published to their experience portal or the website. So let me show you that. Okay. So this is the portal that we had created for our own org.

So when a participant lands on this portal, they can basically search for a clinical trial. You can just enter certain keywords, and then when they click on search, they will see a clinical trial pop up there. And then just one thing to note, with all of the marketing that happens, they don’t necessarily have to do the search, right?

So if I’m taking this back from the potential research study candidate’s perspective, they could just click a link and they were on an ad for, say, this influenza drug they would get taken right here to this screen. Yep. So basically when a participant visits the portal, they find the study and when they click on view details, they will have a whole view of details for the clinical trial.

Just wait for it to load. Yep. So once the participant or a potential candidate is on the website and then they click on their clinical trial, they can click verify eligibility from here. So this is using OmniScript with discovery framework that Salesforce Life Sciences come, comes out of the box.

There are certain rules that run behind this, so when they, let’s take the happy scenario here that the questions answered. Makes the candidate eligible for that particular study. So let’s say yes, no no symptoms. When they click on Next, the business rules engine in the back determines whether the candidate is eligible or not eligible for this clinical trial.

So when we click on next, which it’ll show up a message that, oh, you’re eligible for the clinical trial, and considering that certain clinical trials have a long list of questions that are to be answered, so we also have the functionality to copy the link or email me the link. Once they email me the link, the step where they are at gets stored in the session, and whenever they go to the email and click on that link, they’re back to that session again.

Yeah. And that piece I think is really important because some of the other things that we can do with a form like this like on a branded site for a particular clinical research organization would be is if you wanted to move your pre-screening eligibility checks, which could be like normally a 20, 30 minute phone call into a form like this.

Somebody can, if they’re not filling well, they could fill out part of it. Get the link emailed. Maybe they’re, they come back to it later. So that, that I think is a really cool piece of functionality where somebody could come back to where they’re at and they don’t lose their progress.

Okay. Go ahead. Yep. From there you can, they can select a particular site. They can enter the name, let’s say, let’s have, and just one note for the sites, based on the location of the individual it’s displaying, it can display based on distance as well. Okay.

Once quickly upon save details, the registration has been completed and.

Yeah, that’s it. So if I’m a if I’m somebody who’s looking in to get into this trial, all I had to do was click on a link on a social media ad, get linked to this form, fill out a couple questions. Yep. Looks like you might be somebody that could be a fit. Figure out what be presented with some locations that you might wanna participate in.

As far as the site distance to, from my home to that site, I’ve picked that and now. If everything’s done, there’s no importing of my data. There’s none of that. It’s just gonna be right inside of Salesforce itself in Life Sciences Cloud. So now he’s on the research study candidate. So we’re gonna pivot from being somebody who wants to get into a study to what does the recruiter do their day-to-day work, and how does Life Sciences Cloud improve that process?

So what the recruiter would do is the recruiter would go to the candidate list. They can click on the new inbound list, and they can just review the eligibility and use service cloud voice, or make it, they can just give a phone call to the particular candidate. What they can do is they can just call the candidate and click on the launch candidate launch assessment questions from here, and they can just en enter those details for the patient.

So just tap in those quickly. Just enter all those details here.

And just to note, like these can be configured to be whatever. We put some sample questions in here for like lifestyle, medical history and things like that. But this is just all based on whatever the CRO would like to put in. And all the patient, all the assessment questions that were answered by the patient.

The recruiter has a view of it. The recruiter can go to the assessment tab and they can just click on the assessment that was done recently. There could be multiple assessment. Also show up there based on the candidate. So when we can click on the related list, we can see all the assessment question and responses towards them for the candidate.

Once we go back to that, once the pre-screening step is done, the next thing is the informed consent. So an informed consent. What happens is we have integrated this with DocuSign. Earlier. The pain points were paper consent, delayed those enrollments and lack audit readiness. So what happens is once you click on the informed consent stage, we see that there is a quick action at our, that is shown up at the top.

Once we click on the initial Initiate Con request, this opens up a DocuSign layout for us where we can select a particular template, the consent document that is to be sent to the patient. One thing we are hearing from some of our clients is that they’re actually having people drive to the site just to sign a form.

So the e-consent like he said, can speed up getting the person into the trial because they’re not having to find time to make it to the site. They can just simply do it right there. Got it. Yeah.

Should wait for it to load. Yep. So we have a document already being set up in our Salesforce so we can just select the particular document. We can click on next, we can set up the email subject. We can set up the message to be attached with the email. We can select the candidate that is to, that needs a signature.

That could be a series of signatures that are required for the consent document. We could configure that as well. And then we can set up reminders. So let’s say for clinical trials ending at sometime during August 28th, and we want to send them the reminders to sign their consent during the whole week, or send them weekly reminders.

We can configure that as well here. And once we click on select recipient, we can just specify the recipient here. It’ll just show up.

Document. So once a candidate has already signed the DocuSign, what happens is we can go to the related list and we can see the test. We can see the document that is attached here. We can just open the document. It would show up a preview for the whole document. This is just a test document that we have used right now, but it would be the whole clinical trial consent document.

So let us go back to our country.

Yep. After the e-consent or the consent has been completed, what the recruiter does is the recruiter like assigns or a custom arm for that particular study to the research study candidate. So what happens is once the candidate is deemed to be eligible for the clinical trial, we mark the status as to be enrolled.

Once the status has marked as entered, we see a quick action pop up here. Once we click on the quick action, it’ll create a care program enroll, which means that the candidate has been successfully enrolled for the clinical trial. So once we click on view participant record. You can see all the details here from which re, from which research study candidate they’re cropped up from.

We can see all the details here. Once we have that, we, the recruiter or the coordinator, the recruiter or the coordinator, clicks on assign arm from here. As we saw that initially by creating a clinical trial, we had certain study arms that were configured for it. So once we click on the assigned arm from here, we’ll see a list of available arms.

Let’s say we select control group A for now, and we set the start date to be August 8th, and when we click on next, so this is where the scheduling or the SCH visits that we configured initially comes into the play. Now, once we select the first visit date, it automatically schedules or creates a target visit schedule for the candidate.

Once we click on save schedule, and we can close this, I’ll just give it a refresh. Go on the appointment staff, and once you select the control group, it’ll show up all the visits that were configured and the candidate has to go through in order to complete the clinical trial successfully. It’ll show up here when we click on the schedule option.

It. It gets linked to the Salesforce scheduler where we can schedule the visit and it’ll send an appointment reminder to the patient as well. So what happens next? Once the candidate shows up for the visit, the C clinical coordinator or the recruiter, what they can do is they can come to the care program, enroll your record, and all they have to do is click on start visit.

Once they click on Start visit, it will show a list of. Procedures or checklist of items that needs to be completed for a particular visit. If the candidate is showing up for the baseline visit, that could be ECG checks. There could be BMI checks, there could be multiple other checks as well that needs to be completed.

So we can just enter those details here once everything is done, once everything is marked as completed, done, and then only the visit will be available to be marked as complete visit until all the checklist items or the procedures. Are complete, are not completed, we won’t be able to complete the visit.

So we can just mark the visit as complete visit and, yep. And there’s one more thing that I wanted to highlight here is cohort filtering. So finding targeted participants require manual spreadsheet filtering earlier. So what we tried and do is we created a separate. Lemme just open that a patient recruitment, but the recruiter can open the cohort explorer and filter by medication condition or indication.

There could be certain scenarios where they want to filter a candidate or a potential patient where who is on certain medication or who has certain conditions. So what they can do is they can just click on open filters from here and they can select the, let’s say we are on the medication tab, let’s say they select the medication and they click on search.

It would filter the results for them here. And not only this, if there’s a list of multiple users. So let me just take out the filter here. Let’s assume there were 10 different candidates, and from them I want to filter out five of them and register them for a particular clinical trial. What we can do is we can select certain clinical certain candidates from here, click on register candidates and it’ll show up all the care programs, which are in active status in our org, and they can just select the care program and just click on save in the back.

That would create a research study candidate for each of the care candidate records, which would be then used for the care program. One thing to note here again, is. Let’s say we were on a, let’s say there was a research study candidate. A research study candidate can be deemed as ineligible at any given point.

Let’s say he shows up or he or she shows up for a screening visit and that screening point, the coordinator determine that a candidate is no longer eligible for the clinical trial. What they could do is instead they figure out that. The candidate could be a potential candidate for a different clinical trial over here.

What they can do is they have a quick action here to withdraw the candidate. Once they click on withdraw, it would show up all the o other care programs in the system and they can register, re-register the candidate for to a different care program.

Yeah. Megan, over to you if you want to cover something else. No, I think that was so then at this point, we have it scheduled for visit and go to the CTMS system at this point. We’re working to do that. And then just some other I guess I can take questions, but just real quickly, some things to note.

This is of life sciences called, this is just PA piece of it. So this is the participant management piece that you’re seeing. There’s also we have POCs for patient services and then for advanced therapy management. And we’re developing the intelligent cells there. So there’s a lot of data models within Life Sciences College.

So it could be like, if you’re coming in, it’s a little which data model do I pick? Which use case do I use? So that’s something we’re going through. So if anybody was interested in the other pieces, feel free to ask. But yeah. I’ll take questions now that you guys may have comments.

Yeah. From another partner company perspective, I’m wondering what as the, biggest challenges when implementing Life Sciences Cloud in terms of both the actual implementation, but in terms of the adoption for the companies that you’re implementing it for. I would say adoption has not been an issue for us because.

The big our mantra as we listen, we understand, we deliver. So we really are figuring out what people want and we’re helping with the change management piece. But as far as figuring out life sciences caught, I think the key for us was getting our hands on the solution and making sure that we understood it and we could apply the solution to use cases before we got with the client.

And we’re trying to figure it out near real time. We’re figuring it out ahead of the. Project, right? So we’re learning the tool so that we can apply the tool and creating POCs for different use cases. And so that makes it where we’re very confident in our abilities to implement these things.

’cause we know what we’re doing. We’ve built it from scratch. Rather than, getting a demo org and trying to read through documentation, figure out how did the demo org get set up. We’re setting it up from the very get go. Thank you.

Just Megan, this has really been super interesting and I just have a question. Based on your experience, are you seeing like a large uptick in companies that are, is Life Sciences Cloud starting to really take off? I know they, they it was like maybe, a year or two where it was coming and like we were waiting and then now companies are like starting to jump on.

So have you seen a large uptick in, in companies that are starting to raise their hand and say, yes, we want Life sciences Cloud. Yeah, I would say it right now. As far as what the presales opportunities I have, life Sciences Cloud has the highest number, so we’re really seeing, I think there’s enough technology built now in the tool that people are saying, whoa, like it’s not just.

The first iteration of this has got some substance and some functionalities to it that we really want and things that maybe Health Cloud didn’t address, or their current vendor that didn’t address. People are starting to have a look and then meet moving, like I say, just we just showed the recruiter’s piece of the clinical trial management system, but.

There’s more, right? So we’ve just given a little taste today, but there’s a lot of stuff that can happen there. And that’s both from the commercial side and the clinical side. And then in September, the big releases, right? So then we’re gonna get offline capabilities and the app the iPad.

So if you haven’t seen that, that’s very interesting and that’s something we’re fully leaning into. And we’re ready to get our hands on it in September. Soon enough close not too. Are you seeing a lot of customers trying to move off of Health Cloud into Life Sciences Cloud? Is there any traction like that?

Yeah, a few people who were wanting the data model from Health Cloud did not create custom objects, but maybe they didn’t fit as Health Cloud itself, right? Because the two clouds are built for different use cases, but maybe they wanted patients and they wanted, care programs and things like that.

The other thing is that Life Sciences Cloud, because it was built and created in a space where there’s a lot of AI and Einstein and Agent Force capabilities, I’m seeing a lot of people move over for those things. Some of the SKUs come with things like Tableau Next, agent Force credits, data, cloud credits that kind of stuff.

So those, they’re like, people who are fully embracing the AI and the technology are wanting that. And then just people who probably would’ve been a better fit for Life Sciences Cloud originally if it had been available when they moved to Health Cloud. Or some people I found have.

Health Cloud, but not fully implemented and utilized to its, greatest potential. So they’re saying, Hey let’s just get Life Sciences Cloud and do it exactly how we wanted it to be done in the first place.

Megan I love this. This was really cool. And just during the whole demo I was thinking how disruptive this will be to, folks at companies that are in the EDC space or CTMS and how awesome it would be to have everything on pla on platform in Salesforce. And I’m just curious about our.

One group of friends who maybe aren’t as innovative as others, and that’s the FDA have you seen anything from what their perspective is on enrollment? Using Salesforce? Not really, anybody who’s used Salesforce knows that, trust is the number one thing. So the data is fully secure and it passes all compliance.

But I have not myself heard anything particularly for FDA, but that’s a good call out. I hadn’t thought of that, but we haven’t seen that yet.

And then just to note we kept this kind of, tried to keep it very simple without all of the, bells and whistles that could be done because we just wanna solve the problem and we just wanna show the functionality. Like obviously you could dress up pages, you could have the reports and the dashboards on all those things, but.

Really getting people off spreadsheets, getting people off of, I just got off the phone. Now I have to make a note that I made a phone call. Some of those things that are just, standard Salesforce stuff that you had before. Life Sciences Cloud, pulling that in with the data model, with the ability to use some of the smarter features Omni Studio and Business Rules Engine.

I’m finding there’s a lot of power to that where people don’t fully have to go to a solution like, oh, useful AI agent force to do things, but this, let’s just use these tools that are good and that are here that everybody knows and trusts. And then, when’s that foundation set?

If you’re wanting then to, put your toes into the agent force pool, then people are trusting the data and the tool a little bit more at that point.

Yeah. Thanks Megan. This is Lafe. Thanks for your presentation. Can you tell me, have you done any objection handling or anything with any of the other competitors in this space that help us position this? I know it’s early, you’re, basically done with an MVP and you’re getting in the market and doing, adding some more features as you go.

But is there anything the elephant in the room is Veeva and, anything that’s been produced that allows people like myself as a consultant to, essentially handle objections and guide these people through this process away from them. Yeah, I would say like the majority of people that come to us have already decided they wanna have a look.

But to actually get them to convert over the, I think the biggest thing that people are nervous about is the data migration. Migrating the data in the middle of a clinical trial. That’s why we’re focusing right now, primarily with that research piece and the recruiter piece. So the research study candidate, if we can get that.

Set up and moving and make that a little bit stronger. And you can see the power of the technology. It’s a little more easy than saying just get rid of something you’ve used for years than one day, right? You cut over and everything’s gone. Taking pieces of the pie and moving those over.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, the objections are just, that’s it. It is oh we’re in the middle of the trial. What about the data? What about the historic data? There’s a lot of stuff there. It, it just feels there’s just so much information in those systems that it’s, feels hard to get people to wanna move it.

It feels like a mountain instead of, molehill. Thank you.

Amazing. One of the things, one of the pieces of feedback we’ve had is that people want a little bit more time to interact in small groups. So we’ve got 15 minutes left in the meeting. So I’m gonna give everybody an invite for a breakout room if you have time to move to your breakout room. Get to meet some other people who are in the life sciences community have a little chat with each other.

But before we do that, please join me in either an actual applause or a virtual react for Megan and Juin who I think have opened our eyes to some of the incredible possibilities. And I know for me, this is the first I’ve seen anything like this. Because probably because of the Veeva thing that you were referencing, leaf, this is not something Salesforce themselves have been showing.

So Megan, you puzzled it out. You thought it up and showed something really spectacular and I think innovative and interesting. And so please, if you’re not connected with Megan, find her on LinkedIn. She is an extremely friendly and accessible person. So if you’re like, I wanna know a little bit more.

Please reach out to her. Otherwise. Thank you everybody for joining us for today’s life Sciences Trailblazer Group. We’ve got some additional meetings scheduled for the second Friday of the month for the rest of the year. If you have an idea and you’d like to present, please reach out to me, Shannon, Gregg also on LinkedIn!

Otherwise, have fun in your groups and have a great weekend.

Thanks, Magon and Jubin!

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