Personalizing journeys for over 3.5 million patients

Sutter Health is a not-for-profit, integrated health system that serves millions of Californians. The company invested nearly $1.2 billion in community health programs, charity care, and unreimbursed Medi-Cal costs in 2025 alone.

With 45 new locations opened since 2023, Sutter Health is expanding access and improving care quality in the communities it serves. Recognizing that its existing platform couldn’t support the organization’s growth, Sutter Health collaborated with Slalom to design and implement a scalable, future-ready patient engagement platform.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement and Salesforce Health Cloud answered the call, combining platform and data foundations, core marketing capabilities, scalable operating models and processes, and team enablement to deliver more timely, personalized patient journeys.

Before teaming up with Slalom, Sutter Health used a legacy marketing platform that largely focused on one-size-fits-all communications. That limited the organization’s ability to provide personalized outreach at scale.

Sutter Health’s leaders had a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve. The organization needed to shift to a patient-first engagement model with more meaningful, individualized communication. Leaders also hoped to modernize the marketing ecosystem, enabling automation, scalability, and measurable outcomes tied to patient behaviors, such as program participation and appointment follow-through.

Making all that happen, however, required a unified data foundation across Sutter Health’s systems, which included about 90 million rows of data. Additionally, the organization’s internal teams would need to adopt and operationalize a completely new platform. Yet, focused on improving the patient experience, Sutter Health’s leaders were determined.

“There’s a lot of friction in healthcare,” says Chelsea Lockhart, senior director of growth marketing at Sutter Health. “As a health system, we need to remove that and be there when people need us. A lot of that comes down to having the right messages in front of people at the right time, making sure what they’re getting is timely, relevant, and meaningful to them.”

Gaining control of all that data is a tall order. Keeping it clean is equally important. As Sutter Health continues to scale, the organization needs both precision and speed. Slalom established a scalable operating model that spans data management, content creation, journeys, and reporting. Sutter Health’s teams can now quickly identify trends and create more personalized, effective lifecycle-based patient engagement at a respectful cadence that doesn’t overwhelm recipients.

The initial project included nine integrations and 12 journey migrations from the previous platform. Because Sutter Health has plans to implement additional capabilities down the road, the initial project had to be completely collaborative. Slalom delivered hands-on training and coaching around Salesforce Marketing Cloud; guided teams through journey design and best practices; and built reusable templates, campaigns, and attribution frameworks to empower self-sufficient campaigns in the future. The two teams also ran a hackathon, where Sutter Health’s team created a new customer journey in real time. That close-knit collaboration has generated confidence across the organization.

With the data foundation solidified, Sutter Health and Slalom focused on developing frameworks to enable more tailored patient journeys. A customized attribution framework implemented in Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows the Sutter Health team to accurately follow how patients move through their care journey in real time. The organization can effortlessly track key actions—such as whether someone has made an appointment, activated their MyChart account, or scheduled a referral—giving marketing leadership direct visibility into what’s working and why.

Equally important is protecting the patient relationship. Slalom built a custom suppression framework that helps prevent patients from being oversaturated with messages. If a patient has already received a certain volume of communication within a given period, the platform automatically suppresses subsequent lower-priority outreach, so patients receive only what is timely and relevant to them, without being overwhelmed. The result is a platform that is as thoughtful about when not to communicate as it is about when to reach out.

Slalom also incorporated training and playbooks to identify areas where AI could accelerate work. Alongside the frameworks, Sutter Health’s internal teams now have a stronger organizational foundation and can minimize the effort of previously draining manual tasks, reallocating that time to higher-value activities. As Sutter Health works on new marketing projects, the team feels empowered by what’s been set in place.

“We’re eons ahead of where we were before,” Lockhart says. “We built this together, and being able to move faster and have automations is a huge win.” 

Even with all these changes, patient privacy remains paramount at Sutter Health. Electronic health records and CRM data are unified through structured data pipelines, which support compliance at all levels. Patients also have customized preference and consent management capabilities, so they receive only what’s most valuable to them.

“We built things for Sutter Health that are genuinely theirs—frameworks they can use, scale, and build on long after we’ve stepped back,” says Salom senior principal Misha Sheth. “That’s the goal. Their team now has the confidence and the capability to take on bigger, more ambitious projects independently. That’s what successful teamwork looks like.”

The collaboration with Slalom has enhanced Sutter Health’s ability to engage patients and operate as a modern, data-driven marketing organization. Sutter Health has reduced the time needed for its campaign launches, made that process more repeatable, and can now effectively send out more personalized and timely communications at scale. That’s all driving better health outcomes for patients, closing care gaps, and helping people get the attention and appointments they need. Internally, teams have developed closer working relationships across the organization, working smoothly in tandem to create the best user journeys.

Moving forward, Sutter Health plans to incorporate an AI agent to complement the development of those user marketing journeys. With automation and governance reducing reliance on manual processes, the organization is confident it can build its strategy around further transformation.

“It’s one of the strongest implementations we’ve ever had,” Lockhart says. “A true dream to work on.”