Clinical Data Model
The Clinical Data Model in Salesforce Health Cloud is a pre-built data model designed for healthcare organizations to manage clinical information.
Definition
The Clinical Data Model in Salesforce Health Cloud is a pre-built data model designed for healthcare organizations to manage clinical information. It includes standard objects and fields for clinical encounters, conditions, medications, allergies, immunizations, procedures, and observations, aligned with healthcare data standards like HL7 FHIR to enable interoperability with electronic health record (EHR) systems.
In plain English
“The Clinical Data Model in Health Cloud is a pre-built set of objects and fields designed for storing healthcare data: things like patient encounters, medications, conditions, and lab results. It's structured to match healthcare standards like HL7 FHIR so it can talk to electronic health record systems.”
Worked example
Vermillion Healthcare's Health Cloud deployment uses the Clinical Data Model to manage patient encounters. The standard objects (Encounter, Condition, Medication, Allergy, Immunization, Procedure, Observation) align with HL7 FHIR - the healthcare interoperability standard. When the hospital integrates with their EHR system via FHIR APIs, records flow into the matching Clinical Data Model objects automatically. Care coordinators see the patient's complete clinical history alongside care-coordination data; without the Clinical Data Model, the team would need to build custom objects matching FHIR resources from scratch.
Why Clinical Data Model matters
The Clinical Data Model in Salesforce Health Cloud is a pre-built data model designed to capture clinical information about patients in a standards-aligned way. It includes standard objects for clinical encounters (visits and appointments), conditions (diagnoses and health problems), medications (prescriptions and administrations), allergies, immunizations, procedures, and observations (vitals, lab results, measurements). The model is aligned with healthcare data standards like HL7 FHIR, which is the dominant standard for healthcare interoperability.
The standards alignment matters because most healthcare organizations need to exchange data with electronic health record (EHR) systems, payer systems, and external clinical systems. By modeling data the way FHIR does, Health Cloud reduces the friction of integrating with EHRs and lets healthcare organizations build workflows on top of their clinical data without inventing their own object structures. The model is opinionated but flexible, supporting both standard healthcare workflows and customization for organization-specific needs.
How organizations use Clinical Data Model
Stores patient clinical data in Health Cloud's Clinical Data Model and syncs it bidirectionally with their Epic EHR through a FHIR-based integration. The standards alignment made the integration significantly faster to build than a custom data model would have.
Uses the Clinical Data Model's Condition object to track chronic conditions across their patient population. Condition records support population health reporting that wouldn't be feasible with ad-hoc fields on Account.
Built care coordination workflows on top of the Clinical Data Model, taking advantage of the relationships between Encounters, Conditions, and Medications to give care teams a complete view of each patient.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is the Clinical Data Model?
Q2. Which healthcare standard does the Clinical Data Model align with?
Q3. Why does standards alignment matter in healthcare?
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