Medcast supports better health outcomes through technology and training

Medcast was founded by Dr Stephen Barnett in 2013, building on his PhD in online communities and a desire to bring health professionals together online for peer-to-peer networking and to access quality, independent, and evidence-based education. Today, Medcast provides education and services to  professionals and organisations with the aim of improving the delivery of health care nationally and internationally.

“We have always been focused on quality, combining the best educators and learning design methods with the latest evidence and technology,” said Kate Clutton, Chief Operations Officer at Medcast. “What we needed was a platform that would help us deliver education at scale and to reach those in regional or remote areas that may not otherwise have access to this kind of quality content.”

Salesforce has provided a solution to this challenge and is helping Medcast to scale and to better engage with the healthcare community. It has also supported the business’ rapid rollout of training to upskill more nurses in critical care.

Medcast delivers training directly to health care individuals and works with organisations like aged care facilities, GP practices and day hospitals to provide staff training for compliance and clinical care. The business also partners with government and NGO organisations such as the Black Dog Institute to design and deliver custom training in areas such as mental health.

With the quality of its education, the number of health practitioners and organisations turning to Medcast has doubled almost every year. However, the business lacked visibility into these customers’ interests and interactions. For example, there was no unified view of what courses individuals were purchasing or what resources they were downloading from the website.

Medcast brought in Salesforce to take control of its growth and better understand its customers so that it could improve their experience and deliver education that was in line with their needs.

“We had an opportunity to redesign our technology platform and one of the things we wanted to do was bring all our key customer data into a central and secure repository to enable accessibility,” said Luke Kean, Chief Technology Officer at Medcast. “One of the things we liked about Salesforce was the flexibility to customise the platform ourselves and leverage the AppExchange to meet unique business requirements.”

Kean had used Salesforce previously and was able to leverage his experience and that of Medcast’s development team to complete the first stage of implementation internally. During this process, they also relied on Salesforce API documentation and Trailhead.

“Trailhead is actually one of the best learning resources I’ve seen from a technology company, particularly in the way the content is structured and how easy it is to understand and acquire new skills,” said Kean.

Medcast implemented Sales Cloud first which now provides a complete view of customers, including individual health care practitioners and organisations. It has also brought visibility to the sales process, enabling Medcast to see how opportunities progress through the sales cycle and making it easier to report on activity and conversions. For example, Medcast now has dashboards that provide greater visibility of the sales funnel, marketing attribution, and learner breakdowns. Leveraging these insights has helped Medcast accelerate its growth and increase enterprise sales by 75%.

The rollout of Service Cloud has helped Medcast make greater use of its data and provide more personal support across all channels. Service Cloud has also replaced manual support processes with streamlined case management.

Medcast has additionally used Salesforce Knowledge to introduce self-service and publish answers to frequently asked questions on its website.

“We’re being much more proactive in giving our customers the information they need before they reach out to us,” said Kean. “Using Salesforce Knowledge, we have deflected up to 50% of cases, leading to decreased response times and resulting in happier customers. These efficiencies have also helped us scale to support the growing number of learners who use our content.”

Medcast is now using Pardot to gather more information about leads and customers and use those insights to keep them engaged. For example, Medcast has Pardot forms on its website which customers use to register for courses or download free content. It’s also developed a series of nurture journeys with content tailored to customers’ professions and interest and previous course completion.

Pardot makes segmenting audiences easier and more efficient, contributing to operational efficiency. In addition, the personalised nature of communication has helped Medcast increase engagement with its content.

“Salesforce allows us to capture a rich profile of our customers so we can provide them with high quality education that enables them to deliver the highest quality of patient care. It enables us to serve content that is highly relevant to their profession, interests, and needs which keeps them coming back to us," said Clutton.

Kean stressed the importance of having strong customer engagement and the ability to support health care professionals throughout their career.

“We’re all about lifelong learning and have had some general practitioners and nurses on our platform since they embarked on their career as a health professional. We want to keep supporting them as they progress through their lives as busy health professionals and provide education that matters; that makes a difference in their practice,” said Kean.

Medcast’s decision to put Salesforce in place proved vital early on in the COVID-19 pandemic when the Australian Government identified the need to upskill more nurses for critical care. Medcast had existing learning content on critical care topics, but had to digitise this quickly and coordinate the rollout of training to nurses across the country.

Salesforce and the associated website infrastructure supported this process by enabling Medcast to quickly capture 22,000 registrations in just 15 days along with capturing custom registrant information that could then be stored securely in Salesforce. Medcast subsequently leveraged Sales Cloud dashboards and reporting capabilities to report on registrations, learner profiles, and course completions.

“We provided extensive metrics to the Department of Health about the project and the participation of different hospitals and nurses and Salesforce was instrumental in enabling that. We were able to automatically sync data between Salesforce and our learning experience platform and monitor information in real-time,” said Kean.

The project ultimately resulted in 400,000 hours of learning completed in Critical Care or High Dependency Nursing, with participants coming from every state and territory. In addition, participants reported a 30% increase in knowledge and confidence to be deployed to these nursing roles.

Medcast’s existing use of Slack helped the geographically dispersed team maintain high levels of communication and collaboration during this time. The secure, channel-based messaging platform was initially brought in by the business’ founding team members for brainstorming and quick discussions of various work matters. Now, it’s used wall-to-wall and is integrated with apps like JIRA and Google Cloud to streamline workflows.

One of the most active channels is #education where team members go to share ideas about different research or new learning techniques. There’s also a #customer-service channel where teams can come together to solve difficult issues or simply notify one another of new communications or courses to be launched.

“We’re working in Slack almost all day, every day and have numerous channels for different purposes,” said Clutton. “We’ve also used Slack for audio and voice calls while working remotely.”

“Slack has also just been a really nice way for everyone to keep in touch and check in with one another at a time when morale is a concern. For that reason, there’s also been a lot of informal chat to help lighten the mood and bring the team closer together,” said Kean.

Medcast is continuing to collaborate and find new ways to grow and support its customer base with the ultimate goal of improving health care delivery.

“Everything we do is about providing customers with ongoing value and giving them access to content that will help to improve the standard of health care,” said Clutton.