Customer Story
Power Platform
Faster COVID Screening using PowerApps. ObjectSharp used Microsoft’s new Power Platform to quickly build an intelligent online COVID screening system to clear people before they enter any Hospital in the Niagara Health System.
KEY TECHNOLOGIES USED
- Powerapp Portal
- Power Automate
- Power Bi
- Azure Sql Database
BUSINESS PROBLEM
With the arrival of COVID 19, Hospitals were suddenly required to screen everyone entering their premises. That meant that before any visitors, support staff and even patients could enter the Hospital, they all had to fill out a new questionnaire to help Hospital staff identify anyone who may have recently been exposed to the virus.
In the Niagara Health System, that meant reviewing new questionnaires from up to 10,000 people a day! This put a huge new processing load on the Hospital staff. And it created long lineups of people completing and then waiting to have their questionnaires reviewed, before they could be cleared to enter the hospital.
That is when the Hospital IT staff turned to their software partners at ObjectSharp for help in quickly creating a new application to replace this manual and time-intensive screening process.
HOW WE HELPED OUR CLIENT
Working together with Niagara’s IT team, we decided to use the Portal version of Microsoft’s new Power Platform to quickly build and deploy new intelligent online forms running on Azure. These allow visitors, support staff and patients to complete the appropriate questionnaires before they come to the Hospital. And with Power Platform, we could embed all the necessary processing logic in those online forms, to eliminate the need for Hospital staff to do the time-consuming reviews of every questionnaire.
As soon as a person completes their questionnaire online, we use the workflow capabilities of Power Platform to securely send them – with built-in Captcha verification – a simple Red or Green email message, showing whether or not they are cleared to enter the hospital.
Then when they arrive at the Hospital, all they need to do is show that message to be cleared for entry.
Power Platform enabled a single ObjectSharp senior consultant to deliver three intelligent online screening questionnaires in just a few weeks: from business analysis, to design, to implementation and testing.
All those questionnaires are now securely stored online in Azure. So we have the ability to use PowerBI to automatically produce daily dashboards showing the number of visitors and what % were cleared to enter. Longer term, the Hospitals will be able to use PowerBI to spot trends in different exposures to the virus, and measure how quickly they are processing the thousands of requests to visit the Hospitals every day.