THREE Power Platform templates to help Healthcare services fight COVID-19
Over the last few months, we have seen COVID-19 shock the world. The novel virus has impacted every single one of us personally and professionally, and organisations across the globe are having to react rapidly to try and protect their businesses, as well as their employees through this unprecedented situation.
No sector is feeling the brunt of this virus more than the Healthcare services in each nation, who are tasked with nursing sick people back to full health, even though the experts are learning about how to fight this virus as we go.
Technology firms and providers have rallied around their customers, and local communities to offer their skillsets to try and tackle some of their day-to-day challenges.
The Power Platform team at Microsoft are no different and have created three solutions intended to help support Healthcare organisations battle COVID-19.
For anyone who is new to the Power Platform technology stack, it is a low-code development platform, designed to empower everyone regardless of their technical ability to collaborate and solve problems fast. A set of tools that can be jointly harnessed by the “business” and IT to rapidly spin-up solutions to fast-changing scenarios.
The set of tools within the Power Platform can be broken down into four key areas:
- Power Apps: application development
- Power BI: business intelligence and analytics
- Power Virtual Agents: chatbots
- Power Automate: automation
(1) Crisis Communications Application
The Crisis Communications app. was a joint effort by folks at Microsoft and the wider Power Platform community and took inspiration from a rapid response application that was built-in house by Schlumberger.
Key features of the applications include:
- Employees can report their work status (i.e. working from home) and make requests. This helps managers to coordinate across their teams and helps central response teams track status across an organisation
- Admins can use the app to push news, updates, and content specific to their organisation, and can provide emergency contacts specific to different locations
- Ability to add RSS feeds to up-to-date information from reputable sources such as WHO, CDC, or a local authority
The demo of the application can be seen in the video below.
Useful resources for this application:
(2) Emergency Response Resource Tracking
A local Seattle Healthcare organisation reached out to Microsoft asking if we could support with the following:
- Visibility of critical resources: beds, ventilators, masks, etc.
- The ability for this information to be captured on the go
- Information readily available for managers to make quick decisions
A solution was developed and is now being used by a healthcare service in Seattle. The final solution has three components:
- Admin & Config Center — admins define hospital locations, supplies, and equipment
- Frontline Staff Report Resources — mobile application for staff to log equipment, supplies, staffing needs, stats, and discharge planning
- Decisions Support Dashboard — dashboard which presents information reported back to help managers with decision making
The demo of the application can be seen in the video below.
Useful resources for this application:
(3) Crisis FAQ Response Bot
In these unprecedented times, employees within Healthcare services will have frequent questions about how their particular role is affected by COVID-19.
Not only will employees have questions, but regular outpatients to Healthcare services may have questions about their ongoing treatments, and how COVID-19 will affect those too.
One way to potentially tackle this challenge is by leveraging a Crisis FAQ Bot that can be deployed within your internal IM service, such as Teams or Slack, and/or an external-facing website, which will allow members of the public to access the bot.
Some key suggested topic groups that the bot could cover:
- Emergency Contact Information
- Advisories
- General Public Health Information
- Preventive Measures and Tips
- Exposure Assessment
- Frequently Asked Questions based on reliable news feeds i.e. WHO, CDC, etc.
Useful resources for this chatbot:
If you are a UK based Healthcare organisation interested in learning more about these solutions, please reach out to me at Freddie.Saunders@microsoft.com or your local Microsoft representative. If you are an organisation not based in the UK, please reach out to your local Microsoft team
