With more organisations moving to Microsoft 365, access to a range of new tools is at the fingertips of frontline and support healthcare workers.
Power Apps, a low-code/no-code app development platform, enables healthcare professionals to quickly create solutions to improve the patient experience, coordinate care and drive operational efficiencies.
What is Microsoft Power Apps?
Power Apps is part of the broader Microsoft Power Platform, a suite of business intelligence, app development, process automation, and chat-bot software applications. Power Apps allows business users to easily create low-code and no-code solutions using formulas similar to those in Microsoft Excel.
The wide-ranging capabilities of Power Apps enable both non-IT users as well as IT professionals to create powerful solutions. Whether you work on the frontline delivering services directly to patients or in healthcare administration, you can create solutions to help you make better decisions, work more efficiently and, ultimately, provide better outcomes for your patients.
What Power Apps are Australian healthcare providers creating?
Queensland Health COVID-19 vaccination rollout
Around Australia and globally, the COVID-19 vaccination program has been one of the largest public health undertakings in history. Administration of the vaccine rollout included scheduling appointments, sending email and SMS reminders, capturing patient information, recording doses and sharing information with external agencies such as Medicare.
Starting with Microsoft's Vaccination Management solution as a foundation, Queensland Health tailored the solution to meet its unique requirements. Built upon Power Apps and Dynamics 365, the solution included a canvas app for use by its frontline vaccination team along with a number of model-driven apps to manage administrative functions such as venues and bookings. The solution helped to streamline the delivery and administration of the COVID-19 vaccine across Queensland's state-run vaccination hubs.
Image sources: ABC News, Microsoft Vaccine Management
Hearing Australia Hearing Assessment Program – Early Ears (HAPEE)
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children have one of the highest rates of middle ear disease in the world. To help combat this, Hearing Australia runs HAPEE – a program dedicated to the prevention, early detection and treatment of hearing loss in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
With over 200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities supported as part of HAPEE, Jacqui Peck, an audiologist with Hearing Australia, recognised the need for a system to better collect and manage HAPEE’s data and information.
Seeking a low-code option that she could easily learn and build with minimal ICT support, Jacqui used a combination of Microsoft Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate and Dataverse to create the HAPEE Operations Hub. The solution is now actively used by more than 100 community engagement officers and audiologists to enter and update information during their visits with remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This access to up-to-date information has improved the ability of clinicians to provide services in culturally sensitive ways.
Image source: Microsoft Power Apps Blog
More information about the HAPEE Operations Hub is available at: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/hearing-australia-audiologist-adopts-microsoft-power-platform-to-transform-hearing-loss-prevention-program/
Austin Health digital solutions
In 2020, Austin Health – one of Victoria's largest healthcare providers – rolled out Power Platform across the organisation, providing staff with access to low-code/no-code app development via Power Apps. During the pandemic, the organisation’s IT team developed an app for nurses who were screening visitors coming into the hospital. Before entering the hospital, visitors were asked to fill out a mobile questionnaire. Nurses could then retrieve the visitor’s responses using a QR code, review the information and record the person’s temperature. They then used this information to determine if the visitor was well enough to enter the hospital. Before long, clinicians were also starting to develop their own Power Apps solutions.
Staff anaesthetist Dr Andrew Goldberg created an Anaesthesia Department phone directory app to support junior staff members. If they need to escalate anaesthesia care for emergency surgery, the app allows trainees to quickly look up a department staff member and initiate a phone call to them, all from within Microsoft Teams.
With no prior coding knowledge, Sonographer Michael Huynh used Power Apps to quickly build an app to log the disinfection process of ultrasound transducers, with the data stored in a SharePoint list. In the event of an infection control breach, this allows staff to quickly filter the SharePoint list by date, time and transducers and then forward the list to infection control to identify patients potentially affected.
Read the full article here: https://www.hospitalhealth.com.au/content/technology/article/app-creation-sparks-innovation-at-austin-health-961036707
How to get started with Power Apps
Most Office 365 and Microsoft 365 licences include Power Apps and Power Automate, so if you already have a licence you can get started straight away. Check out Microsoft’s Power Apps learning paths to get underway: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/powerplatform/power-apps. As a healthcare organisation, you might consider deploying the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to achieve accelerated digital transformation. The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 and provides a number of pre-built solutions to enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration and improve clinical and operational insights. More information is available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/industry/health/microsoft-cloud-for-healthcare. At Motive Consulting we can help get you started on your Power Platform journey. Contact us to find out more about our health sector discounts on Power Apps consulting and training.