Microsoft Power Apps Use Cases for Healthcare

The shopping habits and interactions with businesses have changed tremendously with the pandemic, increasing the use of mobile and internet connectivity. Healthcare still seems to lag in technology adoption compared to other industries. Though Covid-19 has boosted telemedicine, patient experience, and better health outcomes, there is more room for change.

The latest shift to value-based care and electronic health records was the tip of the iceberg to legacy modernization. The evolving technologies like cloud computing, automation, wearables, sensors, and AI are continuously transforming the operations of physicians, medical clinics, healthcare providers, and nurse line services. Healthcare is yet to witness better chronic care management, patient engagement, and proactive healthcare monitoring.

Microsoft Power Platform offers a one-stop solution for automation, decision intelligence, and AI needs. In addition to these, healthcare professionals can create applications in no time and with minimal technical assistance with Power Apps. A research report from Gartner says that almost 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low code by 2025.

As healthcare providers are now looking for better service delivery options, the Power platform adds value while efficiently using time and money. Let me walk you through an in-depth usage analysis for healthcare.

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Benefits of Microsoft Power Platform for Healthcare

With Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents, healthcare providers can transform the patient experience, interactions, and engagement while reducing physician burnout and improving efficiencies. A few more details about the benefits:

Personalizing patient care – Self-service options have become popular in many industries. Though there are many Power Apps Use cases in healthcare, creating self-service portals and clinical applications helps patients access their medical records, book appointments, and diagnostics, and interact with staff and physicians as per their needs.

Consider small physician practices, a lot of interactions happen with staff and patients to book an appointment. In this process, clinics have to withhold doctors’ time, and the patient wait time also increases. With an automated workflow and application from Microsoft Power Platform, patients can submit their requests from their mobile and get the services they need in simple steps.

Accelerate time to insights – The volume of data in healthcare is enormous and deriving insights from the data seems challenging. With predefined ML models and AI in Power BI, you can quickly gain insights into resource and equipment utilization, readmission risk, patient satisfaction, physician and staff utilization cost, and revenue drivers.

Though Microsoft Power Platform provides holistic solutions for your needs, a solution like InsightBox accelerates your time to value and brings in more efficiencies.

Automation and efficiencies – Process efficiencies lead to overall business effectiveness. Healthcare is not an exception to this. When we talk about automation in healthcare, most of us think about document management systems and patient data. But there is a lot more. Automated workflows and virtual assistants now enable virtual doctors, patient check-ins, and treatment plans.

During the pandemic, most health authorities, including CDC, leveraged a virtual assistant to guide patients with covid symptoms and take precautions.

As we speak about all the solutions enabled by the Microsoft Power Platform, let us dig deeper into the Power Apps use cases in healthcare. Low-code applications are now vital for faster time to market and a unique experience.

A few Power Apps Use Cases in Healthcare

The needs in the healthcare ecosystem are rapidly evolving. We could identify a few effective Power Apps use cases that can connect to the daily activities of all the stakeholders. Patient experience, engagement, operational efficiencies, care planning, and risk analysis result from the effective use of technology. Let us look into it.

1.   Emergency Response Solutions

Mobile apps for frontline nurses and staff – Communication is critical in the frontline. Though a lot of information sharing happens, most of that goes either paper-based or fed into systems that are not handy. An insider app within large healthcare setups to enable communications with the resources available, patients and their risks, symptoms and treatment plan, and current status of the staff with future requirements and any additional support requests solves many communication and collaboration hurdles.

Critical Medical Information exchange – Imagine the scenario in which a person suffers from a cardiac stroke. The paramedics’ team attends to them, notes the vital medical information, and exchanges with the specialty care team. Typically, information loss or delays might create risk for the patient’s life in this process. With Power Apps and Power Automate, the specialist care team can follow up on the patient through their treatment journey if we can digitize the workflow.

Resource tracking and insights – The most vital element to ensure the best treatment in emergency care is to have real-time information about the medical supplies, beds, equipment, and staffing. Information is clueless without any insights. Leveraging Power BI and Power Apps, healthcare service providers and emergency managers can view resource utilization and forecasts.

2.   Day-to-day healthcare operations

Equipment tracking – Healthcare is not about suggesting the treatment options, physicians’ expertise, and hospital care. It is also about the right medical supplies in place and the medical equipment efficiencies and longevity to detect and manage diseases. Most healthcare practices track their inventory, resources, and equipment and project it for future demand. How do Power Apps use cases help here? The application is easy to develop and accessible to everyone in no time and according to their device choice.

Referrals – Usually, referrals between two specialties are through e-mail or fax. But with the changing landscape, these might create information silos while also causing roadblocks in accessing patient information. For example, if a mental health organization can develop a referral system in Power Apps, then there will be no room for mistakes and delays.

Appointment scheduling – The information repository for the patients is now expanding. They need to be engaged before their visit for an appointment. The more knowledge they get to access, the more personalized care options can be. A patient portal with all the information about the general diseases, clinicians’ information, and services requests in Power Apps can transform patient experience and interactions.

Virtual symptom checker – This was the common application to assess the Covid-19 symptoms during the pandemic. A self-help information system with the basic queries can create an information pool before a patient visits the hospital. A Power Apps portal here reduces physicians and staff burnout. Patients now prefer a value-based care model, unlike earlier days when they didn’t know their illness and treatment basics.

3.   Proactive population risk management

Patient risk analysis – Understanding the risk of chronic and most general illnesses aids healthcare providers in managing their care and planning for the future. The diabetes risk analyzer, readmission risk, and patient profile for possible conditions were mainly based on historical data. With AI in the Microsoft Power Platform, users can connect to different data sources – structured and unstructured to arrive at the risk based on their behavior and lifestyle.

Vaccine management – Vaccine records and administration seem to be a tedious job in the healthcare industry. Power Apps offers simple applications in no time to track and manage the vaccines for the larger population.

How do you get started with the Microsoft Power Platform?

As a beginner, look deep into the platform, identify challenges and improvements you need for the future, and create a roadmap. Are you time-sensitive and intend to accelerate your time to value? Get in touch with our experts today!