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Easterseals Northern California is Taking on Disability Together with Salesforce This Week at Dreamforce


The passage of the California Autism Insurance Law in 2011 was a great victory for people with autism in California, providing behavioral health services that were previously unattainable for many. It opened new opportunities to create solutions for the communities we serve.

But with those opportunities came great challenges, too. Most pressing was how to meet the very large and sudden demand for behavioral health services and how to sustain those services and even grow as needs increase.

A new delivery model

For Easterseals Northern California (ESNorCal), that meant building a network of behavioral health organizations to provide services for children with autism and their families. Additionally, we sought to offer in-home services that, from our experience, have proven to be most effective. In short, we had to quickly ramp up services through our network and also pioneer a new home-based delivery model.

That required a number of partnerships, working closely with other industry leaders across many disciplines. Given the sheer scale of work we faced, technology became a key factor in building our program. We found an enthusiastic partner in Saleforce, seeking to join us in trailblazing new and better ways to serve people with autism. This has become a highly strategic and effective collaboration as we successfully take on disability together.

ESNorCal serves as a conduit between our clients–children with autism, developmental disabilities, and special needs as well as their families–funding sources and our network of behavioral health providers. We needed better ways to connect them all together and enable services. We also needed an agile model that would support home-based health services

A foundational partner: Salesforc

Salesforce has been there with us from the start. We jointly pioneered new capabilities to meet the unique service needs for people with developmental disabilities. Salesforce has been a foundational partner in building our technology infrastructure to serve our communities across 24 counties in Northern California.

Together, we’ve continued to innovate with a focus on continuously improving services. Most recently ESNorCal was among the first organizations to launch services on Salesforce Health Cloud, a new patient relationship management platform developed specifically for the healthcare industry. 

We can now manage multiple relationships between staff, health provider organizations, and practitioners from a single console while streamlining critical business workflows. This is allowing practitioners to deliver behavioral health services more efficiently and improve the quality of long-term client experiences. We are using Health Cloud to personalize engagements and collaboration with clients–providing more effective care. In short, Salesforce continues to help us enhance the services we provide.

Growth and transformation

Nearly five years later, you can see how we’ve grown and transformed how behavioral health services are delivered. With nearly 80,000 client visits per month, we are one of the largest organizations in the U.S. providing behavioral health services.

We certainly didn’t get here alone. We’ve worked closely with many exceptional, innovative organizations. And as noted, Salesforce is a standout for its ongong commitment and in jointly pioneering new capabilities with us. We are taking on disability together with Salesforce.

ESNorCal will be discussing our strategic partnership in more detail at Saleforce’s Dreamforce conference this week in San Francisco. 

Check out the San Francisco Chronicle’s feature on Easterseals Northern California’s participation in Dreamforce.
Read about ESNorCal’s representatives speaking at the conference held in downtown San Francisco⁠ on Business Wire.

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