Dive Brief:
- Salesforce and Accenture will jointly develop a life sciences cloud vertical aimed at bringing generative AI and data solutions to healthcare and biopharma organizations, the two companies announced Monday.
- Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud emerged from a generative AI development hub the two companies announced in May, with the goal of building industry-specific AI models for healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and public sector organizations..
- The partnership has already yielded a cloud-based patient services CRM solution and a generative AI-enabled pharmaceutical analytics tool using Salesforce’s Einstein AI model and Data Cloud infrastructure, the announcement said.
Dive Insight:
The healthcare sector, with its massive data silos, reams of regulations and aging legacy systems, remains ripe for modernization. But compliance and safety challenges have hindered cloud adoption and raised concerns about solutions that risk exposing patient data.
Industry verticals aim to overcome technical hurdles and satisfy security imperatives on a sector-by-sector basis, easing cloud adoption, accelerating data integrations and paving the way for organizations to onboard generative AI tools.
Accenture and Salesforce aren’t the only vendors aiming to bring cloud-based solutions and generative AI tools to healthcare.
Microsoft partnered with Epic to develop a cloud-based electronic health records solution deployed by Mount Sinai Health System in August, and Google Cloud launched Med-PaLM 2, an EHR-trained large language model, last month.
Accenture and Salesforce are already helping pharmaceutical company Cencora digitally enhance patient engagement capabilities using the CRM giant’s hyperscale data platform, Monday’s announcement said.
The new cloud platform aims to expand data integration capabilities across sales, marketing and other functions.
“The rapid pace of science and technology advancements is making treatment decisions more complex,” Emma McGuigan, senior managing director and enterprise and industry technologies lead at Accenture, said in the announcement. “Data and AI will drive differentiation around how life sciences organizations engage with their customers.”
While the two companies did not disclose the size of their investments in the project, an Accenture spokesperson told CIO Dive the company’s work with Salesforce was tied to its previously announced $3 billion investment in AI.
