During this panel, the experts discussed what policies should companies have in place for their vaccine rollout, should companies mandate that their employees be vaccinated, and how can Vaccine Cloud be leveraged beyond COVID-19?
Speaker 1: On behalf of Salesforce DocuSign, OwnBackup and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around how to future proof your vaccine management plan. We're Kirsten Schwab, Vice President of healthcare and Life Sciences at DocuSign moderates the live panel of industry experts from both Salesforce and OwnBackup, where they discuss the sustainability of a vaccine management plan.
Kirsten Schaub: Very much appreciated and welcome everybody. I'm Kirsten Schaub, the VP of commercial sales or healthcare and Life Sciences at DocuSign. We're joined today by Meredith Flynn-Ripley, as VP of product growth, and general manager of vaccine cloud@salesforce.com. We also have Adam Kazansky, the health and life sciences account lead at OwnBackup. We are here today to talk about the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, how organizations and governments are managing distribution, what the future looks like, and how Salesforce DocuSign and OwnBackup. Now, I am going to switch things over to Meredith, thank you so much for joining. Maybe we want to start with a little bit of your background and your role at Salesforce Meredith.
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: Sure. So I'm the general manager of vaccine cloud. I'm within the product organization typically involved in our digital transformation initiatives. And vaccine cloud is very fast moving and really fits into my background. Because I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I was the CEO of a technology company around digital transformation that Salesforce acquired. So the speed that we're operating vaccine cloud is very entrepreneurial, very fast. And it's really come from Salesforce, his response to COVID, from the very early days, when we offered free product to our customers called Salesforce care to anyone actually who needed a customer help desk or an employee Help Desk, and then evolved into a suite of applications that we called worked out calm around helping companies not only respond to COVID, but also create health and wellness and safety and allow employees to come back to work or operate, which many of them you know, never had employees stop interfacing with customers. And so now vaccine cloud is really a suite of solutions built on the Salesforce customer 360 platform, enterprise grade, that allows our customers to deliver on every aspect of vaccine management, from designing, to building to deploying, integrating. It really is an evolution of needs, set it up getting vaccines in arms and doing it very quickly. But it's also how you manage the digital passport or what we're calling the digital badging for vaccines. And how do companies operate their businesses? We're seeing a huge growth opportunity here. Our customers need help around. How do you operate your business in this new normal?
Kirsten Schaub: Thanks, Meredith. You touched on this a little but I'd love to hear a little bit more. I know a lot of people obviously still think Salesforce, they think CRM. Why did Salesforce pivot toward backscene Cloud and you know, through this evolution over the past year?
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: So vaccine cloud and any of our products like workshop comm that have been helping our customers address COVID isn't a pivot. CRM is customer relationship management. Salesforce has always been about connecting customers with their customers in new ways. And we have many segments of our customers that have a praying, deliver manage vaccinations, so what started in the public sector, and enabling stable governmental governments, like Ireland, states, like California, has really been hand in hand with the healthcare provider segment. So the vaccinators retail pharmacy providers and the hospitals and the health care providers. And now we're seeing our commercial customers with a huge need, particularly in the travel, transportation and hospitality areas. How do you enable your employees to travel the world globally? What kind of vaccine verification or issuance needs to be put in place? And today we have many customers where their customers are already asking, well, if I have a customer visiting my premise, they need to be vaccinated, the customer facing employees, they know it's going to really drive how and where employees are going to be going and delivering customer facing services. And it goes beyond just that. It's how do you operate every aspect of your business in this in this world where knowing vaccinations is going to be critical to how you're successful. So you know, it's very core to everything that we do. And that's why our platform being so flexible is able to deliver products in a matter of weeks. And really, it is a speed to market and a very iterative approach that we recommend.
Kirsten Schaub: Absolutely. On the DocuSign side, we've certainly seen a lot of our customers stand up, vaccination consenting really quickly integrated with Salesforce. And that's the main thing people talked about was that speed two to three weeks to get a system, you know, end to end in place, with data flowing from the patient file back to, you know, into the consent and back again. And certainly the issuance of that type of badging is critical to have that whole process as a digital one. So I'll take this on to the next question. For you, Meredith, who do you think are the other stakeholders, we need to make this a success, I mean, you are really describing a lot of new requirements and the leadership that we need to make this happen so that we can get out of our homes and interact more widely with the rest of our customers in the world.
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: Well, it is ultimately all about collaboration. And you obviously need a visionary leader in that customer in that public health authority in the educational institution, you know, someone that really is going to have the ability to look and iterate and approach this as a digital transformation initiative. Studies are showing that this is accelerating companies of all shapes and sizes, their digital transformation journeys, by seven, eight years, healthcare has been woefully behind on this digital transformation journey. So you need a leader who is comfortable with technology and who can enter into these new areas, I think you need a platform that's very flexible that because even though the needs are common, infrastructures are different the systems that need to talk together, and certainly all of the components really need to be looked at from a long term architectural perspective. On the implementation front, Salesforce has been doing a lot to create and pre build components, particularly in the automation and an engagement space, to make it easier to implement faster for everyone and more standardized. And then it's critical that great partners like DocuSign, like yourselves, and OwnBackup are pre integrated, and really looking at this, like a traditional enterprise software project. This is a platform, this is a long term solution. How do we architect it? But how do we build iteratively so that you can launch and evolve it on a continual basis. So it really is a team effort, that is ultimately delivering what's needed in this space, which is a true solution. Unfortunately, as we heard, vaccines themselves are not going to go away. You know, I think that there is some wishful thinking out there right now that says, I'm only going to need this vaccine management capability for three months or six months. We hear that regularly. And I think it's really just a matter of approaching this as more of a larger digital transformation program that's going to have some immediate impact around vaccines and COVID, but can really be used to operate your business long term.
Kirsten Schaub: I'm smiling, because that is certainly something we've heard at DocuSign, quite a bit like this is only going to be happening for this short amount of time, and then we'll be moving on for it. And to me, that just doesn't seem it's almost like we haven't been learned from what's just happened to us. If we don't set it up as businesses as health systems as the healthcare system as a whole, then it's like we haven't learned anything. I agree. Yep. But I think to your point, we don't know what six months away will look like. But having that platform set up, that you can continue to iterate on, and that you can you know, change as the needs require. If you've got the right platform underneath it, and you know, you've got the right data protection in place and you've got a strategy, then, you know, you're ready.
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: Right. And I think our partners play such a critical role in this right to deliver that truly complete, best in class enterprise solution.
Kirsten Schaub: Yeah, absolutely. Well, obviously, we feel we adopt DocuSign are very close partners of Salesforce and very much focused on, you know, helping our customers and organizations here. Adam, I'm going to turn things over to you. This is really where we see own backup helping a lot of organizations. Can you tell us more about your role with this highly regulated data?
Adam Kazansky: Yeah, thanks, Kirsten, as a health care company, or frankly, any organization that's managing vaccine related data, you know, you're dealing with highly sensitive and in many cases, regulated data, there are rules around how long you can retain that data who had shared with where it's stored, you know, things of that nature. The speed at which your teams are working with this data is also another key consideration. It's awesome. As Meredith said, it's all happening very quickly increasing the likelihood for errors to happen. You know, couple this with the fact that Salesforce has a shared responsibility model where the customer has the responsibility to protect their own Salesforce data. And it becomes pretty clear that there's an important gap that needs to be addressed with regards to safeguarding data related to vaccines.
Kirsten Schaub: Absolutely. On the DocuSign side of things, you know, as I talked about before, we're definitely focused on that consenting piece and the flow of data back and forth to Salesforce, the key piece there is the full, we consider that the agreement process, which is capturing the consent in this pace, and flowing the data, and all that sensitive data back through Salesforce into those data warehouses or in a very focused and secure area. What do you think about regulations? And how we, you know, we were talking about that badging, love to get your thoughts about how own backup fits into those regulations that might be coming down about how we manage this?
Adam Kazansky: Yeah. So you know, as the number one Cloud Data Protection platform for Salesforce with over 3000 customers, we actually specialize in data protection for many Life Sciences and healthcare organizations. You know, we run a survey every year and one of the questions is, have you ever experienced a data loss or corruption? About two thirds say no, 10%? Say yes, and the rest aren't? Sure. And that's just the point, you know, without the proper detection system in place, you just simply don't know.
Kirsten Schaub: Yeah. And then when we widen things out, from state and federal government, large health systems to Meredith's point earlier, we certainly see a lot more commercial businesses in travel, transportation, all kinds of organizations, where do you see that moving?
Adam Kazansky: There's a lot of concern when information might go missing, or problems that might happen. Right. So there's a lot of clauses that can certainly lead to that, I think the overwhelming majority of those incidents are, are due to human error. Right? So when makes a mistake, you know, some of the other top causes are like third party applications or integrations, where processes can break. And, you know, something happens in advertently, that causes corruption on a massive scale. Migrations are another sort of lead to kind of how that scenario plays out. And also, you know, bad code or, or triggers that, you know, might happen on the development side.
Kirsten Schaub: So what could these companies you've talked about it a little bit, when you we've got a lot of folks on this call, who feel like they're somewhat prepared? I'd love to hear more from you on, what should people be worrying about from a data loss perspective? What can actually go awry?
Adam Kazansky: Yeah, absolutely. Those are, those are really the scenarios I just talked about. And that's, you know, kind of the, the human error piece of it, right. And as you're developing on the platform, and you're, you know, iterating on top of that platform, and you're constantly building on these processes, there's a propensity for things to happen, where mistakes can happen, or processes break, or coding is done wrong. And this information is super critical. You know, and that's really what you want to, you know, protect against is not necessarily what happens from the infrastructure perspective, but more from your side as the one who's responsible for that data.
Kirsten Schaub: It feels like a significant risk, doesn't it?
Adam Kazansky: Absolutely.
Kirsten Schaub: What's the biggest thing, you know, own backup over the past year, as you've worked through and gotten involved in a lot of these projects? Like, what's the big learning for you and your customers that you want to make sure everybody walks away? Understanding around OwnBackup?
Adam Kazansky: Yeah, I think that's a great question. Kirsten, it's really about, you know, minimizing downtime, when things happen, it's inevitable that it will happen in some capacity, you know, whether it's small minor incident or a massive problem, getting back up and running. And continuing with your operations is really critical to have a plan around, you know, some customers are prepared fully for that. And when that does happen, not only is compliance, a big issue, but the responsibility to their customers is super important. And that tends to obviously, you know, affect downstream all the way to the company reputation.
Kirsten Schaub: Well, that just sort of speaks to what Meredith was talking about is building for the long haul, and making sure that you've built a platform and a whole digital infrastructure that's going to, you know, be ready for whatever happens. I think that we're at a point where I can turn things back over to Kiki for some questions. Kiki, you want to take things from here?
Kiki Krawczyk: Yes. Thank you, Kirsten. And thank you, everyone for your awesome insight. That's and very helpful for everyone on the line here. Will vaccine clouds still be available post COVID-19? How do you see that technology evolving?
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: Sure. Thank you, Kiki. Well, you know, I think that that is the beauty of building for the long term approach. And as we are all hearing and reading, you know, this is something that is not going to go away even from a vaccine perspective, right doctor is talking about the vaccine boosters, we're already seeing vaccine clouds evolve into things that have nothing to do with getting shots in the arms. But all around how does a business operate? Right? How do they it's critical that that accompany knows who's been vaccinated in order to protect the safety and health of their employees, and also their customers. So things like the digital badging, flows and bots and automation that are going to give and then dashboards and command centers that are going to give customers that information in order to operate with the knowledge of who's been vaccinated and who hasn't, should employee positions change. I think that was a pretty controversial statement, that are you going to actually say, this customer facing employee, if you're not vaccinated, can no longer be customer facing, I think there's a lot of long term implications there that companies have to be prepared for. But that said, let's even look at the healthcare segment right now. This is all about patient engagement, the platform and the solutions that are being built for the vaccination and scheduling the vaccination should equally apply to scheduling a mammography scheduling, any type of patient interaction, all the telemedicine that's been enabled, you know, no one's going to want to go back to the old days here. So these are all going to just become part of how a business operates. And so we'll vaccine cloud as a brand, the around. Well, there will be boosters. So it will be around for that side of things and getting shots in arms. But really, it's just moving into new levels of customer engagement across the whole customer 360 lifecycle. So it's very much around and you know, again, who's going to see what other needs are emerging right now we know that there's a digital passport or the badging? And then what are the new businesses? What are the new opportunities that are going to have to emerge beyond that? So, you know, that's the exciting thing about it. That's the silver lining in all this from a technologists perspective, it really is ushering in that digital transformation at a pace that we had all hoped wouldn't be caused by a pandemic. But the good news is, there's going to be a lot of great new patient and customer interactions, and healthier and more aware and knowledgeable population at large.
Kiki Krawczyk: Yeah, definitely. And to your points, would you be able to share some best practices besides the ones you've already mentioned, or just elaborate on them, that organizations can use to get started with their vaccine management plan?
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: I was talking to the CIO of a very large financial services company recently. And that person said to me, yeah, I can understand the vaccination status. But so what I'm now armed with some great talking points, I do think it is though, get the expert opinions, document the expert opinions and help educate your customers and everyone that you're talking to right now, your own company, you know, Kristen's gonna go talk to her head of HR right now. And so I think that that's really an important step, get educated, get the data, this is a data issue, and we're going to solve it with data. And then the next best practice is really be entrepreneurial. This pandemic has basically given executives freedom to take chances and make new decisions in terms of how they're interacting with their customers. And then really, it's about architecting, as I said, for the long term and looking at enterprise best in class solutions that are integrated. This is a large integration project already from a technology perspective, and it's integrating into some pretty old systems sometimes or nonexistence systems do really approach it as a architectural challenge and a platform and a solution view. And certainly have that evolutionary mindset that's critical from a best practice perspective, and, and make changes fast and, you know, make mistakes, and then you can correct them. But it's better than going back to I think, what was the typical timeline for companies to adopt technology, which was often you know, a year two years, we have customers that are launching portals and bots in five days, you know, large companies. Now, again, that is kind of the positive and all this that there is some amazing technology innovation happening and companies really stepping in to help. It's been amazing to see the collaboration across the ecosystem, you know, some of the alliances groups that were involved in really our in our partner ecosystem was right there and ready to say how do we help? That's been really, really humbling to be part of that.
Kiki Krawczyk: Yeah. Appreciate that. I do want to open up this next question to Meredith, Kirsten and Adam. How long does it typically take to implement vaccine cloud specifically, and other solutions that you've seen.
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: So we've had a state or local government launch in as quickly as less than three weeks. And you know, this is again, getting to the basics, and then augmenting over time. And then we've had other companies approach it from a two to three month perspective, honestly, everyone knew vaccines were coming. But I think a lot of the planning didn't necessarily happen as early as it could have been. So the accelerated timelines, I'm not sure they were absolutely necessary in the beginning. But that said, people have learned and are continuing to grow, we see the changing landscape all the time. I mean, our customer, these states and local governments have been planning to open up to the general population July 1, you know, June, and now suddenly, this week alone, we had eight states lower their numbers to, if not the general population close to the general population. And so the ability to respond as quickly has been amazing. So you know, I do think that it's a timeline that is up to the customer. But if you're approaching it with a platform approach with pre-built components, with pre integrated solutions, that's how you can make it a matter of days.
Adam Kazansky: Yeah, I mean, on the OwnBackup side, it's really fast time to value, you know, you're up and running with in as little as 15 minutes. There's no project, there's no implementation cost. It's not a, you know, professional services engagement that you have to plan around, there's nothing physical that needs to be installed in your environment. You know, the connection for OwnBackup is established through an authenticated user. And then we start to backup your critical data within a few clicks by leveraging the Salesforce API's. So really simple to get going.
Kirsten Schaub: And on the DocuSign side, just, you know, doubling down on what Meredith said, the critical thing is the prebuilt. You know, integrations on the app exchange, right, the DocuSign, for Salesforce and the different levels of Salesforce integration have been built and perfected over a decade. So now it's just ready to be used. Right? So that makes the data flow. And you know, leveraging the power of Salesforce from a workflow perspective, and API integration really fast. Because it's been built over a long time, nobody's starting from scratch, to build something from the ground up. It's just leveraging the technology that's already been set up and pre integrated, which makes all the difference.
Meredith Flynn-Ripley: Can I add something to my best practice? Answer, which is something we haven't touched on, but I know is important to many of us. And that is, at Salesforce. It's not just enabling vaccines, but really trying to put technology in place that's going to enable equitable access, and getting the vaccines into underserved communities, to the population at large that may not have access or readily accessible. We have a customer in the UK that's using our platform to schedule nurses that are going into the homes of the homebound and the elderly. And so that's really an important initiative, we use our Office of ethical use team, they are integral to our product development teams. And so I do think of best practices to really think about how you as a company, as you're developing your own vaccine management solution, how are you making sure you're getting it into the hands of your population in an eco-equitable way, which means you may have to take more steps to get it into the hands of some versus others. And it also means the communications and the education aspect, you know, something touched on is, you know, we're going to be getting into a point where there will be more vaccines than people that want them in the US right now. And how do you communicate and educate those that are vaccine hesitant? How do you really help people understand that this is helping the population like the smoking example? Right, that this is not just for you, but this is for others. And so that is an ongoing need. And the communications? I think one of the lessons learned as many of our customers think, Oh, I just need to do the appointment reminder or you know, a notification, but it's actually a real communications campaign that you know, think about involving your team in on the communication side. This is not just an IT vaccine management solution. It's how are you communicating to your employees? How are you communicating to your students? How are you communicating to your citizens?
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or the Salesforce AppExchange can assist your vaccine management needs, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at salesforceISV@carahsoft.com.Thanks again for listening and have a great day.