Healthcare providers worldwide constantly strive to find ways to provide better patient care and enhance the patient experience. The patients of today’s world are well-informed, and most have access to technology at their fingertips. In this blog, we will take you through how healthcare organizations can enhance healthcare operations and deliver better, more accurate care by leveraging Power Platform and Power Apps. Being a low-code application development platform, it enables rapid app development, agility, and excellent business proficiency. According to a research report by Gartner, around 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low code by 2025.
Transformation of Healthcare
As with any field, healthcare was slowly transforming and adopting digital practices. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the dynamics as it brought about a screeching halt to in-person interactions with doctors owing to the preventive measures. Healthcare opened its arms to rapid digitization to facilitate healthcare delivery. Even after the pandemic, patients /consumers have warmly welcomed the digital healthcare transformation.
A seemingly complex task, Power Platform and PowerApps have made the legacy modernization in healthcare much more manageable. Power Platform is a one-stop shop for fulfilling all the requirements in automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence, which is especially relevant in the healthcare field. Healthcare professionals can build apps in hardly any time and with little technical support too. This can be of immense benefit to talent-strapped healthcare professionals. The transformation of healthcare will have multi-fold benefits. Healthcare companies can improve patient experience, make their operations more efficient, and easily coordinate care and inter-department communications.
Also read: https://saxon.ai/blogs/microsoft-build-2023-conference-highlights/
What are PowerApps?
Microsoft PowerApps is a collection of apps facilitating a fast development environment for creating customized apps for any organization. Harnessing PowerApps, an organization can transform the tedious manual processes everyone hates into smoothly operated digital processes. Moreover, the organization can customize the apps according to their requirements. In the healthcare sector, having tailor-made apps developed to suit the patients’/consumers’ demands can enrich the patient experience.
How can PowerApps help in healthcare?
The healthcare industry generates a staggering amount of data every day. The data is fragmented and stored in various locations, and much of it is unfit to use, leading to a loss of value. Leveraging Power Platform and PowerApps, healthcare providers can access the data easily to have the insights they need. The valuable insights will enable them to save money as well as enhance patient care and experience. They can use the same to analyze and identify gaps in healthcare delivery and forecast the requirements for further resources.
Some use cases of Power Apps in Healthcare.
Let us see the numerous ways in which the healthcare industry can leverage Power App to enhance the overall experience of all the stakeholders:
1. Simple orders/forms:
The sales team is usually required to visit the clients’ sites and have the data at their fingertips. With PowerApps, it is very convenient for the sales team to check stock levels, complete sales orders, and have client information from their mobile devices. One benefit of PowerApps is that the users can use it on the move.
2. Enhance Customer experience:
Integrating PowerApps can help engage customers in an industry where customer engagement is challenging. By building an app that will allow the customers to look into the latest insights, stay up to date on events and receive communication on new product launches, engaging customers is more effortless. Organizations can also observe who the users are and identify the maximum engaged customers.
3. Product information:
Correct product information is a requisite, especially for pharmacies and sales teams. Using PowerApps, a healthcare organization can rapidly build an app that determines a product’s attributes and the necessary information. It will also allow the customers and the healthcare sales team to access the product information making the process transparent easily.
4. Communications:
Using the PowerApps planner and mobile applications, frontline healthcare staff can seamlessly track essential data points and communicate their requirements.
Some use cases are:
- Notify the present condition of the equipment in use.
- Track the supplies in each section of the healthcare facility and the rate at which they are used.
- Request additional staff according to urgency, responsibility, and department.
- Track and report particular illnesses (such as Covid-19 positive cases)
5. Patient registration:
Setting up a patient registration app where patients can register themselves and store all their relevant medical information safely and securely is a practical use case of PowerApps in healthcare. Giving the doctors access to the patient information in a much-structured way via the app is easier and smoother as the practitioner can focus their endeavors in more relevant areas.
6. Manage simple resource requests:
Although the demand for more resources is always there in hospitals and clinics, PowerApps can enable an uncomplicated way of managing resource requests. The staff can report outdated equipment for replacement and request new products. The app can have an approval process and filter options, making the process simpler and more efficient.
7. Capture meetings:
Deciphering the notes of a meeting can be a troublesome and time-consuming task. By developing a meeting capture App from PowerApps, the medical fraternity can easily take notes, upload, attach photos, and direct emails with tasks to the attendees. It saves time and allows healthcare professionals to focus on their apt tasks.
8. Employee onboarding:
Onboarding usually involves various departments, which leads to approval delays. Moreover, new joiners usually have to review a lot of paperwork and wait for equipment. All these can be solved with PowerApps, as you can create smooth workflows that ensure the new joiners have everything to execute their work. Integrating various data involving policies, standard operating procedures, forms, and contacts in a single platform will simplify the onboarding process and make it smoother.
Power BI in the healthcare sector
Power BI is a cloud-based analytics service that furnishes a complete and integrated view of crucial data allowing users to observe the performance of the business using live dashboards. From generating visual and interactive reports to providing business intelligence, it provides users with data analytics in a user-friendly environment.
Especially in the healthcare industry, Power BI can give a cost-effective way of providing valuable insights needed to improve patient care and reduce costs while being compliant with rules and regulations. Healthcare organizations can look into their data with better visibility and have the necessary insights for key performance indicators. Using Power BI, the healthcare organization can monitor vital quality indicators such as admissions, emergency cases, the number of patients, the average length of patient stay, and the cost/spending.
Why use Power BI in the healthcare sector?
In healthcare, organizations usually track everything, ranging from patient satisfaction to staffing schedules, patient waiting time, and much more, making the data quite complicated. Power BI allows the generation of detailed, understandable analytics, which helps find key trends.
Some use cases of analytics:
1. Healthcare professionals can easily access data across the board and provide timely responses, especially in emergencies.
2. Integrating Power BI the existing portals and hospital apps can provide the healthcare team with data that will empower their day-to-day decision-making.
3. Safeguard the data and ensure compliance while providing access to the healthcare team.
4. Enhance the understanding of complex data.
5. Produce vital clinical insight seamlessly.
6. Manage data easily across various departments.
How to get started with Power Platform?
Are you a healthcare provider and want to know how Power Platform can help your organization? From reducing costs to improving patient care and, at the same time, following strict compliance regulations, leveraging the Power platform can benefit a healthcare organization in multiple ways.
Contact us at Saxon for a demonstration today.