Andrea relied on her memory for recalling her patients\u2019 long-term history. Her notes were entered into a paper diary and required lots of flicking back and forth through pages to find previous treatments and the corresponding notes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nRecognizing the shortcomings of the manual process, and despite her self-professed distrust and aversion to technology, Andrea had tried a CMS system in the past. However, she quickly abandoned it after finding it too difficult to use and not tailored enough towards her needs. For now, the paper (and proven) way of working was, to Andrea, the best solution.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
COVID – The catalyst for change<\/h2>\n
This landscape was about to see an abrupt upheaval. In March 2020, the United Kingdom went into complete lockdown in reaction to the COVID-19 global pandemic, and suddenly Andrea was faced with the news that she could no longer treat her patients. The first few weeks of lockdown meant no work whatsoever. Due to the nature of her work, Andrea\u2019s concern was two-fold: not just, \u201cHow could she get back to work?\u201d<\/em> but also, \u201cHow could she keep her husband, her patients and herself safe while doing so?\u201d<\/em> She needed to get the clinic back up and running as quickly and <\/em>as safely as possible. This was a terrifying dichotomy, but one thing was for sure: things could not go back to the way they were.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
To find a way forward, Andrea turned to her close friends Taiki Yoshida, Microsoft employee and passionate Power Platform Community member, and Chris Ma, a Musical Director in London\u2019s West End, for help.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to upgrade,\u201d Taiki told her, which seemed mind-boggling at first to Andrea, who had just been thinking about how to get the practice back up and running during COVID. But Taiki\u2019s vision was to take this as an opportunity to convert Andrea\u2019s business into the way of working she had always dreamed of.<\/p>\n
When asked, \u201cIn a perfect world, what would you want to do?\u201d Andrea identified two key things that needed to change:<\/p>\n
\n- First, she wanted to \u2018gut\u2019 her clinic, completely revamping it with the latest equipment and allowing her to have an environment that could be entirely washed down and sanitized to meet all COVID-19 regulations.<\/li>\n
- Second, she wanted a fully automated system in place to hold all patient information, resources, and medical forms needed for her work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The first of these would need to be handled with the mortgage company, who \u2013 to Andrea\u2019s astonishment \u2013 were more than happy to provide her a mortgage holiday to get her business back up and running again. With these savings, Andrea was able to change out her carpets for washable floors, get full PPE, new uniforms, and wipe-able and washable hospital grade pillows, as well as install plastic coverings for fabric surfaces in the clinic. To prevent Andrea having to wait to purchase her dream high-level clinical bed, a close family friend kindly lent her the funds for eight weeks, enabling her to get up and running straight away. Modelling her practice on how the dentistry industry was tackling the COVID problem, and her own research about the virus, Andrea was able to reassure herself that the newly refurbished clinic was as safe as it could possibly be made, for her patients, for herself and for her husband.<\/p>\n
The second wish was something Microsoft Power Platform could make happen.<\/p>\n
Into the Dataverse – Microsoft Power Platform solution<\/p>\n
The vision for Andrea and her practice was to create one central location to display all the data about her patients. This would save her time, streamline her booking process, allow her to improve perceptions of her business, and grow her patient base. There were two key streams of work to be done:<\/p>\n
\n- Customer facing: Revamp the website and include an automated booking system.<\/li>\n
- Internal operations: Build a single source of truth for all of Andrea\u2019s information needs, automate the flow of information into this central repository, and create a user-friendly interface for accessing the data.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The initial challenge would be converting the self-professed \u201canti-technology\u201d Andrea to a digital way of working. Taiki started in May by introducing her to an Outlook calendar as an online replacement for her diary. She learned the discipline of entering all her appointments, professional and personal, into a digital calendar. Once her calendar was digital, Microsoft Bookings could be used to automate the process for patients to know when Andrea was available and schedule appointments.<\/p>\n
The next challenge was to build a user-friendly data store. It was a simple choice: Dataverse would provide Andrea with everything she needed and more:<\/p>\n
\n- Store patients\u2019 sensitive and confidential data in a secure and access-restricted manner.<\/li>\n
- Create relationships between information so that all data about a single patient could be linked together.<\/li>\n
- Provide a user-friendly interface in the form of a model-driven Power Apps application.<\/li>\n
- Receive information automatically through integration with the rest of Microsoft Power Platform.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Through a gentle, iterative approach, Andrea was introduced to different elements of the solution, and together with Taiki and Chris, she collaboratively built up the database to be able to store her<\/em> data in a format that worked for her<\/em>. While far from an easy process for Andrea, with the encouragement from friends and a user-friendly Power Apps interface, she was able to get to grips with the system and most importantly learn to trust the system.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Online booking system using Microsoft Bookings<\/h3>\n
For patients, the ADH Clinic experience starts with Andrea\u2019s new website. From here, prospective patients can select a treatment and their desired date & time, with full visibility of all Andrea\u2019s available slots ready to choose from. They then fill in their contact details and automatically receive an email confirming their booking and blocking out the appointment in their Outlook calendar. The email also contains a link for the patient to manage their booking, which is a well-loved feature, giving patients the autonomy to reschedule or cancel their own bookings at the click of a button.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Patients book appointments on website, powered by Microsoft Bookings<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Left<\/strong>: Screen for canceling or rescheduling appointment; Right<\/strong>: Confirmation email after appointment is booked.
\nNote<\/strong>: No real-life personal data is displayed in any screenshots; all data shown is for illustration purposes only.<\/em><\/p>\nA native feature in Microsoft Bookings is its ability to sync to an Outlook Exchange calendar, meaning that any changes in Andrea\u2019s calendar affect the available slots in the site for patients to book, and any bookings on the website automatically go into Andrea\u2019s calendar. Not only does this ensure that there is only ever one patient on site at a time, but it also provides Andrea with one single source of truth where she can view everything going on in her day.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Equally essential to getting a clinic up and running during a time of COVID was the ability to have down time in-between patients for Andrea to do a full cleaning of the clinic: washing the floor, getting changed into a completely new uniform, wiping down and washing all surfaces in the clinic \u2013 a process that takes up to 40 minutes. Microsoft Bookings contains an out-of-the-box provision for preventing back-to-back bookings, providing configurable down time between each booking. The implementation means that the patient is never aware of the buffer time, but the next patient cannot book into it, allowing Andrea the freedom to conform to the government\u2019s COVID regulations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Microsoft Bookings admin experience for configuring scheduling options<\/em><\/p>\nAdditional features in Microsoft Bookings allow Andrea to:<\/p>\n
\n- Set up automated reminders with a customized link to the medical information form.<\/li>\n
- Edit the names and descriptions of services and add extra services that patients can book.<\/li>\n
- Set the minimum lead time for patients to book appointments to ensure she will be available.<\/li>\n
- See the quantity of bookings at a glance, giving Andrea far more visibility into how well the clinic is doing and whether she needs to send out some gentle reminders to patients to try to hit her personal bookings targets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n
Automated patient forms – using Microsoft Forms and Power Automate<\/h3>\n
Replacing the paper medical form was a must to get the clinic back in business. Once patients have booked an appointment, they are sent a link to an online medical form, created using Microsoft Forms. This form gives Andrea all the information she needs prior to an individual coming in for treatment.<\/p>\n
The responses from the digital medical form are gathered automatically by a Power Automate cloud flow, which adds the response data into Dataverse. If the response comes from a patient who is already in the system, the medical details are automatically linked to that patient. If there is no match, a new patient is created in the system and the medical details are linked to this new patient. This ensures that no erroneous duplicate patient records are created, the latest medical information is available in the Patient view in the model-driven app, and Andrea immediately has visibility to new patients coming in.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Left<\/strong>: Intake form powered by Microsoft Forms; Right<\/strong>: Power Automate cloud flow – copies form data into Dataverse.<\/em>
\nNote<\/strong>: No real-life personal data is displayed in any screenshots; all data shown is for illustration purposes only.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Managing patient information – Power Apps model-driven application<\/h3>\n
The patient\u2019s medical information is automatically moved into the \u201cpi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance<\/em>\u201d of the solution: The Power Apps model-driven application.<\/p>\nUtilizing the standard Contact from the Common Data Model, Taiki was able to quickly create the Patients table \u2013 the backbone of the data model. From there it was a case of building out the relevant forms and views for the data and using sub-grids to surface related records on the patient form, such as the patient\u2019s medical information. The out-of-the-box relational capabilities of Dataverse enables data to be represented from different perspectives, allowing Andrea to see everything pertaining to one patient, but also to see, for example, all medication records across her entire client base.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Power Apps model-driven application used to view and manage all patient details and activities
\nNote<\/strong>: No real-life personal data is displayed in any screenshots; all data shown is for illustration purposes only.
\n<\/em><\/p>\nUsing this app enabled Andrea to see all the information about all her patients, organized in a user-friendly, intuitive layout. The patient record page provides an insight into their full contact information and a timeline populated with:<\/p>\n