Care Plan
A Care Plan in Salesforce Health Cloud is a structured record that captures a patient's clinical goals, identified problems, planned interventions, scheduled tasks, and progress over time.
Definition
A Care Plan in Salesforce Health Cloud is a structured record that captures a patient's clinical goals, identified problems, planned interventions, scheduled tasks, and progress over time. The Care Plan ties together Patient (a Person Account), Care Team members, Goals (what the patient should achieve), Problems (clinical conditions being addressed), and individual Tasks or Activities that implement the plan. Care Coordinators, social workers, and case managers use Care Plans to organise the longitudinal effort around one patient, especially in chronic-care, behavioural-health, and post-acute scenarios where many providers contribute over months or years.
Care Plans are central to Health Cloud's value proposition. Without them, the patient's record is a flat list of disconnected interventions; with them, the same data organises into a coherent plan of care that the entire Care Team can read at a glance. Health Cloud ships standard Care Plan templates for common conditions (diabetes management, post-surgical recovery, chronic-disease coaching), and admins extend with org-specific templates. Government and public-sector programs use the same structure under Public Sector Solutions, where Care Plans become Case Plans tracking participants in social services programs. The data model is similar; the vocabulary differs by industry.
How Care Plans organise longitudinal patient work
The Care Plan data model
A Care Plan is a parent record linked to the Patient (Person Account). It owns child records for Goals (what the patient should achieve), Problems (clinical conditions), Interventions (planned treatments), and Care Plan Tasks (specific actions assigned to Care Team members). The model is hierarchical; the Care Plan is the root, everything else is a child.
Goals and how progress gets tracked
Goals carry a target (Reduce A1c to under 7), a measurement schedule, current progress, and a target date. Care Team members update Goal progress as the patient hits milestones; Health Cloud dashboards roll Goal completion across the patient population for outcomes reporting.
Problems and clinical conditions
Problems represent the medical issues the Care Plan addresses (Diabetes Type 2, Post-Surgical Wound Care, Depression). Each Problem links to Goals and Interventions. Reporting on the most common Problems across the population guides program design and resource allocation.
Care Plan Templates
Health Cloud ships templates for common care scenarios and lets admins build org-specific ones. Applying a template to a patient instantiates the standard Goals, Problems, and Tasks; the Care Team then customises the plan to the patient's specifics. Templates are how programs scale without forcing Care Coordinators to design each plan from scratch.
Care Team and assignment
The Care Team for a patient is the set of users (primary care physician, social worker, case manager, family member) attached to the patient. Care Plan Tasks assign to specific Care Team members. The Care Team view shows everyone working on the plan together, which is essential for coordinated multi-disciplinary care.
Care Plan and Patient Card
The Patient Card is the Health Cloud surface that summarises a patient on one page: demographics, vital problems, active goals, recent activity, Care Team. The Care Plan provides most of the data behind the card. A patient with an active, well-maintained Care Plan has a useful Patient Card; one without has a blank.
Public Sector Solutions and Case Plans
The same data model underpins Case Plans in Public Sector Solutions for social services. A Case Worker uses a Case Plan to track a participant's goals, identified needs, and planned interventions across a program. The vocabulary differs but the structure is the same.
Common pitfalls
Three patterns recur. Generic Care Plan Templates that do not reflect the org's actual programs produce data that does not match operational reality. Tasks assigned to inactive Care Team members never get done. And Goals without measurement schedules become aspirational rather than tracked. Each is addressable with disciplined template design and routine Care Team review.
How to set up Care Plans in Health Cloud
Care Plans are the organising structure for chronic-care and case-management programs. The configuration work is in template design, Care Team setup, and ongoing measurement.
- Confirm Health Cloud is enabled
Setup, Health Cloud Settings. Verify the relevant feature licences and permission sets are assigned to Care Coordinators and clinical users.
- Build Care Plan Templates
Create one template per program (Diabetes Management, Post-Acute Recovery, Behavioural Health). Each template includes standard Goals, Problems, and Tasks. Refine templates as the program matures.
- Configure Care Team roles
Define the standard Care Team roles for your programs (PCP, Social Worker, Case Manager, Family Member). Map roles to user permissions and patient assignment rules.
- Apply Care Plans to patients
From a patient record, apply the relevant Care Plan Template. Customise Goals, Problems, and Tasks to the patient's specifics. Assign Tasks to Care Team members.
- Track and review progress
Schedule regular Care Team reviews to update Goal progress, close completed Tasks, and adjust the plan. Goals without active measurement become aspirational rather than tracked.
- Generic templates produce plans disconnected from operational reality. Design templates per program; do not rely on the ship-default options.
- Tasks assigned to inactive Care Team members never get done. Audit assignment routinely.
- Goals without measurement become aspirational. Track current progress against target on every Goal.
- Care Plans accumulate across years for chronic patients. Plan for archival or summarisation of old plans to keep the patient view readable.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Care Plans in Health CloudSalesforce Help
- Health Cloud OverviewSalesforce Help
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Care Plan.
- Care Plan TemplatesSalesforce Help
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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