Care Team
A Care Team in Salesforce Health Cloud is the group of people coordinating on one patient's care, modeled as a set of Care Team Member records that link each person to the patient and give them a role on that patient's care plan.
Definition
A Care Team in Salesforce Health Cloud is the group of people coordinating on one patient's care, modeled as a set of Care Team Member records that link each person to the patient and give them a role on that patient's care plan. Members can be internal Salesforce users such as a primary care physician or care coordinator, external providers, or relatives like a family caregiver or emergency contact. Each member carries a role, an access level, and effective dates, so the org always knows who is involved, what they are responsible for, and how long their involvement lasts.
The Care Team exists because chronic care, behavioral health, and post-acute work pull many people around the same patient over months or years. Without it, a record becomes a flat list of disconnected interventions. With it, the Care Team component shows the full roster on one screen, with each person's role, contact details, and accountability visible at a glance. Care Team roles also control access to the patient's care plan, so the team model doubles as a sharing model.
How the Care Team is structured and put to work
The Care Team Member record
Every person on a Care Team is represented by a Care Team Member record, which is a junction between the patient and that individual. The patient is usually a Person Account in Health Cloud, and the member is either a Salesforce user, an external provider record, or a contact such as a relative. Each member record carries a role, an access level, a relationship to the patient, and effective and end dates that bound the involvement. The role is the most important field because it drives almost everything downstream. Reporting groups by role, task routing keys off it, and the care plan uses it to decide who can do what. The access level is the second pillar, since it determines whether the member can see and edit the patient's care plan. A care coordinator typically gets read and write, while a family caregiver gets read only. Because a Care Team Member is a real record and not a checkbox, you can build list views, reports, and automation against it. That is what lets an org answer questions like which patients have no assigned coordinator, or which memberships expired last month and still hold access.
Roles, and why the picklist matters
Care Team roles describe a person's function on the team, such as Primary Care Physician, Specialist, Nurse, Care Coordinator, Social Worker, Behavioral Health Specialist, or Pharmacist, plus non-clinical roles like Caregiver, Emergency Contact, and Legal Guardian. Salesforce ships a set of delivered roles, and admins extend or rename them to match clinical convention in their org. The catch is that roles are only useful when applied consistently. If one team marks a patient's nurse as RN Coach and another marks the same function as Nurse, every report that groups by role splits into noise, and any assignment rule that targets nurses misses half of them. Roles in Health Cloud are not the same thing as Salesforce role hierarchy. A Care Team role applies to the patient's care plan and the records under it, not to the org-wide visibility a role hierarchy grants. Treat the role picklist as governed master data. Lock it down, document what each value means, and review additions before they reach production, because cleaning up inconsistent role values after thousands of patients exist is painful.
Access flows through the team
The Care Team is a sharing mechanism, not only a roster. When you add a member with a given access level, you are granting that person visibility into the patient's care plan and the records attached to it. This is why the Care Team historically rode on the Case Team model, with the care plan implemented as a Case and the access applying to that Case and its children. Care coordinators usually receive read and write so they can update goals and tasks. Specialists may get read and write on their slice of the work. Relatives and emergency contacts often get read only, enough to stay informed without editing clinical content. Two things follow from this. First, removing a member matters as much as adding one, because access lingers until the membership ends. Second, the Care Team is never the whole access picture. A user's effective visibility into a patient is the sum of Care Team membership, role hierarchy, sharing rules, and any manual shares. When auditing who can see a patient, you have to look at all of those together, not just the Care Team panel, or you will miss access that arrives through another path.
Care Team and the care plan
The Care Team and the Care Plan are designed to work as a pair. A care plan organizes a patient's goals, problems, and tasks, and those tasks are meant to land on specific Care Team members. The role on the membership is what makes assignment sensible. A nursing assessment goes to the nurse, a social intervention to the social worker, a medication review to the pharmacist. If the Care Team is empty or the roles are wrong, task routing has nothing to aim at and work stalls. This pairing is the heart of integrated care management, where a single patient case ties together goals, health conditions, activities, and care barriers that represent social determinants of health. The Care Team supplies the people who own each of those threads. A post-operative plan, for example, might place the operating surgeon, a physical therapist, and a case manager on the same team, each with a role and the right access, so the plan can route follow-up to the correct person without anyone leaving the platform. The team and the plan reinforce each other: the plan describes the work, and the team describes who does it.
Displaying the team: the Care Team component and ARC
Care coordinators live on the patient record, so the Care Team needs a clear on-screen view. The Care Team component, surfaced on the patient card or workspace, renders the roster as a list with each member's name, photo, role, and one-click contact actions like call or message. It is the fast answer to who is on this patient's team and how do I reach them. For relationships that are too complex for a flat list, the Actionable Relationship Center, known as ARC, draws the same data as an interactive graph. ARC is the tool of choice when a patient sits inside a blended household, a guardianship arrangement, or an institutional network where a simple roster hides the structure. Newer Health Cloud experiences, including the Empower component set, give admins control over which columns and actions the Care Team list shows, so the display can match how a given team works. The point of both tools is the same. A care team is only useful if the people using it can see the whole roster, understand each person's role, and act on it without digging through related lists.
Care Team versus Account Team, and the Public Sector cousin
It helps to place the Care Team next to its relatives. The standard Account Team Member object is the general Salesforce mechanism for putting a group of internal users on an Account with roles and access. The Care Team is the Health Cloud treatment of the same idea, specialized for patients with clinical roles, external and family members, and a tie to the care plan. They are similar in spirit but separate in practice, so a Health Cloud org uses Care Team for patients and the standard Account Team for non-patient relationships like a B2B account's internal staff. The pattern also appears in Public Sector Solutions, where social-services participants are coordinated by a Case Team. The vocabulary changes, but the structure of people, roles, and access on a central record is the same, because both products build on shared Industries foundations. Knowing these cousins exist keeps you from reinventing a model that already ships, and it tells you which one to reach for: Care Team for healthcare patients, Case Team for public-sector cases, Account Team for everything else.
Add a member to a patient's Care Team
Adding a member puts a person on a patient's Care Team and, depending on the access level, grants them visibility into that patient's care plan. You do this from the patient record using the Care Team component or the related action, with the patient already set up as a Person Account.
- Open the patient and find the Care Team
Navigate to the patient's record (a Person Account in Health Cloud) and open the Care Team component on the patient card or workspace. This is the roster you are adding to.
- Start a new Care Team member
Choose the action to add a member. Search for the person, whether that is an internal Salesforce user like a care coordinator, an external provider record, or a contact such as a relative.
- Set the role and access level
Pick the role that matches the person's function on this patient (for example Care Coordinator or Caregiver) and set the access level that controls how much of the care plan they can see and edit.
- Set the dates and save
Enter the effective date and, where the involvement is time-bound, an end date. Save the record so the member appears on the roster and the access takes effect.
The Person Account whose Care Team you are adding to. The member record is the junction between this patient and the person.
The person being added: a Salesforce user, an external provider, or a contact such as a family caregiver or emergency contact.
The member's function on the team, such as Primary Care Physician, Care Coordinator, Nurse, or Caregiver. Drives reporting and care plan task routing.
How much of the patient's care plan the member can see and edit. Coordinators typically get read and write, relatives read only.
- Access does not end on its own. A member keeps their granted visibility until you end-date or remove the membership, so off-board people promptly.
- The access level on the membership is what shares the care plan. Picking the wrong level either over-exposes a patient or blocks a coordinator from doing their job.
- A contact-only member, such as a relative who is not a Salesforce user, cannot log in. Internal coordination still needs a licensed user on the team.
Prefer this walkthrough as its own page? How to Care Team in Salesforce, step by step
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Improve Outcomes with the Care TeamSalesforce
- Add a Member to the Care TeamSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Care Team.
- Create Roles for Care Team MembersSalesforce
- Integrated Care Management Data ModelSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Care Team.
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.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is a Care Team in Salesforce Health Cloud?
Q2. How does a Care Team Member's role-based access level typically work?
Q3. Why is maintaining an accurate Care Team important for complex patients?
Discussion
Loading discussion…