A state-of-the-art CRM Salesforce transformation

APSS improved care among its aging patient population by implementing a state-of-the-art CRM. 

Trento is the kind of idyllic town, situated in Italy’s mountains, that locals and foreigners alike would love to live out their golden years in. There’s one problem: there aren’t enough doctors to help its aging population get the care they need. In the coming years, one-third of the region’s general practitioners are expected retire, which leaves the half a million people in the area – and a country one of the highest percentage of people 65 plus in the world – in a difficult position. 

The region’s medical system has, for many years, been centered around its hospitals, which have all the equipment, technologies and healthcare solutions that ailing and elderly patients need to survive. But with a dearth of doctors and an aging population with increased chronic conditions, there’s a growing need for patients to make use of other types of medical services, from at-home care to remote appointments to outpatient clinics. 

APSS Trento, a healthcare delivery company, is responsible for overseeing all these offerings. With more than 8,500 clinicians, physicians and nurses on its roster, and a portfolio of seven hospitals, 60 nursing homes and thousands of medical clinics, it’s one of the more vital – but also more complicated – businesses in Italy. 

As its offerings have expanded, and with the region’s population only getting older, APSS had to figure out a way to improve the patient journey. It’s clients often make use of multiple services, which could be combined in a way that better optimizes care. At the same time, it wanted to more efficiently deploy its staff and increase collaboration among colleagues. “We wanted to provide our professionals with new solutions so they could cooperate on a case in a much more integrated way,” says Ettore Turra, APSS Trento’s chief information officer. 

To solve its challenges, APSS did something unusual in the healthcare industry – it implemented Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution across its business. The platform is usually used in more consumer-facing sectors, such as retail or banking, to keep track of customer buying habits, but Turra sees a lot of similarities between the businesses in those sectors and his own. “The needs of a healthcare company aren't so different from the needs of service companies,” he says. “They provide services to their clients and require an integrated view of those customers – we need to do the same with our patients.”

The implementation couldn’t have come at a more appropriate timing. Just months after its completion, COVID-19 hit, which made tracking patient information and improving care that much more important. Thankfully, the CRM solution worked as planned. APSS is now not only delivering more holistic care to everyone, but it’s helping to save lives during a still ongoing pandemic.

Over the years, APSS Trento has responded to its region’s aging population by increasing its services – it now offers all kinds of care from remote to home to long-term. As its customer base increased, and with many of its citizens tapping into a variety of support, it needed a way to better manage the patient journey. It wanted insights into how people were using its services, glean better data to create care plans that would make use of a variety of offerings, deploy its staff in more efficient and appropriate ways, enhance communication and content sharing between medical professionals and more. Ultimately, it had to undergo a major digital transformation that would change the way it ran its business and helped its clientele.

APSS asked PwC to help implement Salesforce CRM, which it chose because it needed a solution that could track and record patient interactions, could be rapidly deployed and could evolve along with the business. While it hired PwC as a systems integrator, it quickly realized it offered a lot more. “PwC could provide us with a complete solution, including state-of-the-art CRM, a technology skillset and healthcare industry expertise,” says Turra. “That’s not a common combination to find in one vendor.” 

While working with PwC to identify APSS’ pain points, the healthcare provider decided it would transform its home care division first. It was the area that had the fewest technological capabilities and was also the hardest division to document given that care happened in homes, rather than a hospital or clinic, where clinicians can more easily track treatments. 

Designing the right program, though, could only be done with direct input from clinicians, nurses, operational staff and others who would be using the CRM. PwC held a number of workshops to better understand their experiences and needs. Through these meetings, PwC prioritized the technical requirements to integrate into the system, but it also came up with a roadmap for a broader organizational change. 

It then worked with doctors over two week periods to create working prototypes of the system. This process, says Andrea Mantovani, a director at PwC Italy, was critical to the program’s success. Physicians could offer real-time feedback based on what they were seeing, while PwC could constantly iterate and improve the system. “By doing this every two weeks, there is continuous improvement and you really learn how to understand each other,” says Mantovani. “We spoke two different languages at the beginning, but we learned to speak as one.”

Turra agrees that this continuous development approach was key. “Product development was really enforced by direct feedback from the field and from the users,” he says. “Everyone was happy that their feedback was incorporated into the product development.”