Healthcare Technology Company Improves Patient Operations With Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds
TrialSpark needed to handle a rising volume of clinical trial enrollments and support cases without losing sight of any individual patient. Cases had to reach the right coordinator, escalations had to reach a clinician, and patients had to stay informed through every milestone of a study. We built Salesforce for clinical trial patient operations, combining Service Cloud and Shield with Omnichannel routing, a public-facing patient community, and Marketing Cloud journeys. Patient engagement reached 85% in the first month of a new trial deployment, time to resolve study-related support tickets fell 77%, and enrolling each new participant now takes 20 hours less.
A Healthcare Technology Company Running Clinical Trials at Volume
TrialSpark works in clinical trials, where the operational unit is a person deciding whether to join a study and then staying with it. Enrollment is the beginning of a relationship that runs for months, involves scheduled milestones, and depends on the patient understanding what happens next.
That makes patient operations both a support function and a communication function at the same time. A patient calling with a question is a support case. A patient who has not heard anything in three weeks is a retention risk. The two run on the same record and the same relationship, and treating them as separate workstreams is how trials lose participants. TrialSpark also needed all of this to work across many studies at once, each with its own criteria, its own coordinators, and its own set of questions patients ask.
The Challenge: Seven Requirements Across Enrollment, Routing, and Patient Communication
TrialSpark asked for a digital transformation solution that would do seven things:
• Manage high volumes of support cases and the influx of new subjects for clinical trials and studies
• Visualize the enrollment pipeline of new studies
• Route clinical trial caseloads to the appropriate research coordinator or clinical support agent
• Integrate with their cloud-based telephony platform and their internal operational application
• Escalate patient support to a clinician or physician for review
• Keep patients informed of the various milestones of their clinical trial and the next steps
• Deliver public FAQs tied to specific clinical trials
Read together, the seven requirements describe one system rather than seven features. A question arriving by phone, a routing decision, a clinician review, and a milestone reminder are all events in the same patient relationship. TrialSpark needed them recorded in one place so that volume could grow without the patient experience thinning out.
Our Approach: Salesforce for Clinical Trial Patient Operations, From Enrollment to Escalation
We started with the foundation. Our Salesforce Service Cloud implementation deployed Service Cloud with Salesforce Shield to handle the influx of patient enrollments, and we integrated the platform with TrialSpark’s internal operational application so the two stopped holding separate versions of the same patient. Shield matters here because clinical trial records carry a higher bar than ordinary customer data, and the controls needed to sit inside the platform rather than around it.
We then set up work queues to support the various stages of the clinical trials and used Omnichannel to route work to the appropriate clinical support agent based on queue availability. Studies move through stages, and a case belongs to a stage before it belongs to a person. Queues that mirror those stages meant a case reached an agent qualified to answer it, and omnichannel meant it reached an agent who was actually free.
Voice came next. We integrated AWS Connect with Service Cloud so support agents work in one screen whether they are taking an inbound call or placing an outbound one. Call context and case record sit together, which removes the pause at the start of a call where an agent asks the patient to identify themselves and their study.
For patients who would rather not call at all, we deployed a public-facing community for clinical trial subjects. It lets patients self-serve through study-specific knowledge articles and case deflection features, so a common question about a specific trial gets answered without a case being created. That is where the public FAQ requirement was met, and it is the piece that keeps case volume from scaling in lockstep with enrollment.
Escalation and visibility were handled together. We created a flow that routes escalations to the appropriate clinician based on specific study criteria, which put a defined path between an agent who cannot answer a clinical question and the person who can. Alongside it we built reports and dashboards that isolate patient experience across studies, show enrollment volumes, and measure the SLA of the clinical support agents. Enrollment pipeline visibility came out of that work.
The last piece was proactive communication. We connected Service Cloud with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to build a clinical study experience and journey, with triggered emails and SMS based on each patient’s engagement in the study. A patient approaching a milestone hears about it before they wonder. A patient who has gone quiet gets reached rather than noticed later. That connection is what turns Salesforce for clinical trial patient operations into something patients feel, rather than a system that only helps the staff.
Tools and Products Used
This build spanned three Salesforce clouds and several platform capabilities:
• Salesforce Service Cloud: the core of the build, handling patient support cases across every stage of every study
• Salesforce Shield: added platform-level protection around clinical trial patient records
• Omnichannel: routed work to the appropriate clinical support agent based on queue availability
• AWS Connect: integrated with Service Cloud for inbound and outbound calling inside the agent workspace
• Experience community: a public-facing community for clinical trial subjects, with study-specific Knowledge articles and case deflection
• Salesforce Flow: routed escalations to the appropriate clinician based on specific study criteria
• Reports and dashboards: isolated patient experience by study, showed enrollment volumes, and measured clinical support agent SLA
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: connected to Service Cloud to drive the clinical study journey with triggered emails and SMS
• Salesforce Sales Cloud: part of the Salesforce environment for this project
Service Cloud holds the record, Marketing Cloud acts on it, and the routing, telephony, and community layers decide how each patient reaches TrialSpark and how quickly TrialSpark reaches back.
The Results: 85% Patient Engagement, 77% Faster Resolution, and 20 Hours Saved Per Enrollment
Overall patient engagement hit 85% in the first month of a new trial deployment. That number comes out of the Marketing Cloud journeys more than anything else. Patients received messages tied to where they actually were in the study, which is different from a schedule of announcements sent to everyone at once.
Time to resolve study-related support tickets dropped 77%. Three things caused it. Queues put cases in front of qualified agents, Omnichannel put them in front of available ones, and the community answered a share of the questions before they became cases at all. The AWS Connect integration removed the rest of the friction by keeping the call and the record in one place.
Enrolling each new participant now takes 20 hours less. Enrollment was where the manual work concentrated, spread across systems that did not talk to each other. Integrating the internal operational application with Service Cloud, and giving coordinators one view of the enrollment pipeline, is what recovered those hours.
| Area | Outcome |
| Patient engagement | 85% overall patient engagement in the first month of new trial deployment |
| Support resolution | 77% reduction in time to resolve study-related support tickets |
| Enrollment | 20 hours saved in time to enroll each new participant |
| Case routing | Work queues by study stage, with Omnichannel routing to the appropriate clinical support agent |
| Patient self-service | Public-facing community with study-specific Knowledge articles and case deflection |
Patient Operations Is a Support Problem and a Communication Problem
Clinical trials depend on people staying. A participant who drops out costs the study more than the enrollment did, and most of the reasons people leave trace back to not knowing what is happening or not getting an answer when they asked.
TrialSpark treated both as one problem. Support and communication were built on the same record, so the system that answers a patient’s question is the system that knows when to reach out unprompted. The engagement number and the resolution number moved together for that reason.
If your patient or participant operations are spread across systems that do not share a record, our team can help. Get in touch to talk through what Salesforce for clinical trial patient operations would look like for your studies.
