The Technology Challenge
The mission of
Pancreatic Cancer Action Network is to take bold action to improve the lives of everyone impacted by pancreatic cancer by advancing scientific research, building community, sharing knowledge, and advocating for patients. As part of this mission, the organization has focused on three priorities:
- Increasing awareness of pancreatic cancer
- Improving patient outcomes
- Increasing fundraising to make a greater impact on the mission
PanCAN recognized the need to assess their technology ecosystem’s ability to accomplish these goals. One focus area within the technology stack are the tools needed to help the PanCAN team manage the organization’s clinical trials finder and physicians database. With a focus on delivering exceptional service to patients, changing technology would allow PanCAN to streamline, centralize, and automate processes. At the same time, it needed to be flexible and robust enough to meet future needs.
The Solution
PanCAN worked with Heller Consulting to evaluate the organization’s goals and develop a technology strategy that would support those goals today and take the organization well into the future. This strategic technology planning and selection process revealed the Salesforce platform as an ideal fit for PanCAN’s needs. Given PanCAN's focus on user experience for internal case managers and need to manage multiple data sources to effectively match patients with physicians and clinical trials, the Person Accounts model, which is core to the new Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, is an ideal solution. The timing has meant that PanCAN could take advantage of the latest capabilities available from Salesforce and have the flexibility to adopt other functionality that Salesforce continues to roll out in the new Nonprofit Cloud. With a clear technology plan in place, PanCAN moved forward confidently, partnering with Heller Consulting to implement the new Nonprofit Cloud. With this implementation, the Heller team is helping PanCAN use the core person accounts model to match people who have pancreatic cancer with appropriate clinical trials, and to match patients with healthcare providers who specialize in pancreatic cancer treatments.
The Results
Using the new Nonprofit Cloud, the technology will give PanCAN access to features and capabilities that are now available to nonprofits for the first time. For example, PanCAN will be able to use the data processing engine for mass record updates and calculations. PanCAN will also have access to OmniStudio, which allows for more tailored user interface capabilities so people can be guided through a workflow to do their specific task or data entry in Salesforce. For example, for a patient questionnaire process, the new Nonprofit Cloud allows PanCAN to create a tailored screen that includes only the fields relevant to intake, and then save multiple records at once. Perhaps most importantly, PanCAN has the flexibility to add other capabilities in the new Nonprofit Cloud.
