Salesforce announced Life Sciences Cloud, a trusted, secure platform for pharmaceutical (pharma) and medical technology (medtech) organizations to help them speed up drug and device development, enlist and retain patients across the clinical trial journey, and leverage AI to deliver personalized experiences to customers. 

Why it’s important: The life sciences industry relies on accurate, accessible data to advance R&D efforts and clinical trials. Yet the industry sorely lags when it comes to adopting digital tools that would increase efficiency and accuracy, with 88% of healthcare and life sciences organizations not yet having realized their digital transformation goals.

Salesforce perspective: “The life sciences industry requires integrated, compliant, and trusted solutions — powered by data, AI, and CRM — to deliver stronger stakeholder engagement from R&D through commercialization,” said Amit Khanna, SVP & GM, Health and Life Sciences. “Salesforce is leveraging its experience in healthcare to better serve life sciences organizations by adding features for clinical trials, revenue management, and more personalized communication, giving the industry more powerful ways to better serve their customers.”

The Salesforce solution: 

• Commercial Operations (GA now) helps manage the commercial lifecycle with timely insights around contract compliance, pricing, inventory levels, and more. For example, AI-powered bots can send alerts to field reps when an item is unavailable for an upcoming procedure or offer account forecasting insights to help reps better understand where and what to sell. Commercial Operations includes:
  • Health Intelligence, powered by Tableau, is a predictive analytics tool that provides insights to drive informed business decisions. Now, medtech sales teams get recommended rebates, bundles, or discount pricing, helping them identify new offerings that customers can add to their existing catalogs.
  • Medical Sales Emails uses generative AI to automatically create tailored, secure messages notifying stakeholders like hospitals or clinics that new devices are available, or to follow-up on a sales visit with a physician.

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• Clinical Operations helps life sciences organizations set up and execute efficient trials, both traditional and decentralized, to better support participants, clinical sites, studies, and sponsors. Clinical Operations includes:
  • Data Cloud for Health (GA now) securely connects and activates medical, social, and behavioral patient data from different sources into a unified, real-time profile. This enables pharma and medtech companies to help identify potential patient or study risks, like adherence to therapies in clinical trials. In addition, Data Cloud for Health can create segments from that data, such as groups that could be suitable for a new clinical trial or care program.
  • Chain of Custody Management (GA now) allows pharma companies to maintain a clear, traceable digital history of events for precision medicines, and validate records with e-signatures (GA Feb 2024) aligned to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. This can help promote patient safety and compliant record-keeping through every stage of cell and gene therapies, from apheresis to infusion.
  • Participant Management (GA June 2024) will get randomized trial participants onboarded quickly with auto-matching and customized portals. This makes it faster to recruit, educate, and engage participants helping to speed up clinical trials and may help lower attrition rates.  

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• Pharma CRM* is an engagement platform that will help pharma organizations interact with stakeholders using individualized correspondence and their medical-, legal-, and regulatory-approved digital content. This includes managing drug samples, capturing provider consent, and streamlining dosage inquiries across various channels. Pharma CRM* will include:
  • Healthcare Professional (HCP) Engagement (GA October 2025) will use AI to learn from engagement data, claims, and research insights, combined with offline capabilities, to support hybrid HCP experiences. With a 360-degree view of HCPs, pharma organizations will help provide the right prescriptions to the right people while ensuring the wider availability of their treatments.
  • Einstein for Life Sciences (GA now) will automate manual tasks like targeted email outreach. With Knowledge Article Generation & Service Replies, liaisons can quickly find appropriate documents and repurpose successful past cases into helpful resources to address medical affairs requests within agreed-upon timeframes. 

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Customer perspective:

• “SI-BONE was looking for ways to help our customer service teams spend more time innovating and less time on cumbersome, manual processes like duplicative manual data entry. With Salesforce, we were able to digitize our implant request PO process, saving our team hours each week.” – Shefali Jadhav, Sr. Business Systems Manager of IT at SI-BONE

Availability:

• Commercial Operations features, including Health Intelligence and Medical Sales Emails, are generally available today.
• Clinical Operations features, including Chain of Custody and Data Cloud for Health, are generally available today. Advanced Therapy e-signatures and Participant Management will be available beginning in early 2024.
• Service Replies and Sales Emails are generally available today. Knowledge Articles are currently in pilot, and will be available beginning in early 2024.
• HCP Engagement for Pharma will be available beginning in mid-2025. 

 Learn more:

• Salesforce partners Accenture and Deloitte Digital will bring their implementation support and deep global industry expertise to help Salesforce accelerate Life Sciences Cloud 
• Learn about Salesforce for healthcare and life sciences 
• Learn what 400 global healthcare and life sciences leaders are doing to drive productivity, efficiency, and data effectiveness here
• See the launch of Life Sciences Cloud at Dreamforce ‘23

*Sales automation functionality for pharma/biotech customers is not currently provided by Salesforce and will not be available until mid-2025. 

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.