Industry
Urology Healthcare Provider
Technologies Used
Microsoft Power Apps
Microsoft Power Automate
Key Outcomes
Easily view historical prescriptions and diagnostics reports
Rich designer view capabilities when using Power Apps
VNB Health assisted an Urology Healthcare Provider deploy a Power Apps solution integrated with Athena Practice EHR via FHIR to manage patient admissions and care.
Customer Profile
The customer is a prominent healthcare insurance provider serving a vast population. With a rich history in the industry, they are committed to delivering comprehensive healthcare solutions and enhancing member experiences. The organization operates in a highly regulated environment, necessitating robust and compliant systems. Due to the sheer volume of transactions and complex nature of healthcare data, the customer handles a significant workload, demanding efficient and reliable IT operations.
Customer Situation
The customer handled 270/271 Healthcare Eligibility Benefit Inquiry transactions to verify patient healthcare eligibility, coverage, and benefits. The customer relied on custom API interfaces built on Microsoft BizTalk Server to connect with multiple insurance payers. This complex integration environment, characterized by high transaction volumes and frequent changes, was prone to instability. Updates to one payer’s interface often disrupted connections with others. To mitigate this risk, accelerate development and ease the build, deployment and testing process, the customer sought an automated solution that would enable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) with robust automated testing.
Customer Profile
The customer is a leading healthcare provider based in Richmond, Virginia. It has a long history of providing quality care to the Greater Richmond metro area since 1929. The practice prides itself on its strong commitment to the community's urological needs by recruiting highly skilled physicians and using the latest technology. The practice comprises of over 55 providers that include urologists and urogynecologists as well as physicians specializing in the urologic aspect of anaesthesiology, pathology, radiation oncology, and radiology.
Customer Situation
The customer was looking for a solution/mobile application for their healthcare providers. They required a search functionality to search patient data from their Athena Practice EHR system utilizing the HL7 FHIR APIs. The app was also required to facilitate addition of new patients to the providers bed list in different facilities. The app also required views for the care provider to review a patient’s medical history, prescriptions, diagnostic lab reports and other relevant details.
VNB Solution
VNB Apps and Integration team assessed the requirement and recommended a solution using Microsoft Power Platform. The team used Power Automate to integrate with the Athena Practice EHR FHIR APIs to get real time data to the front end.
VNB theorized that a single point of entry for the physicians to gather patient data would cause a huge reduction in the time taken to achieve their goals. The mobile Power App was designed to be intuitive, user-friendly, and easy to navigate. The Landing screen enabled the care provider to maintain their respective Patient’s bed list. It also included a Patient Search integrated with Athena Health Practice EHR FHIR APIs. The App included eye-catching tiles for care providers to navigate easily through each screen to access necessary information like Patient Details, Medical History, Lab reports, Clinical Notes etc. Role-based access was implemented to ensure certain features and areas of app are available only to the authorized people in the organization and administrators
The list of FHIR resources integrated with the Power App were:
- Patient
- Practitioner
- DiagnosticOrder
- Coverage
- DocumentReference
- Observation
- Condition
- CarePlan
- Appointment
The overall solution benefited the customer to enable further digital transformation for various IT use cases with the use of Microsoft Power Platform. The Power Platform has the following features:
- Platform Independent: Power Apps is platform independent and can run on any devices
- Low code Development: Power Apps is a low code development model.
- Easy deployment and versioning: Power Apps provided its own versioning so no need to integrate with other source control systems.
Customer Benefits
The Power Apps and FHIR solution brought numerous benefits to the client, including but not limited to:
No Downtime: Ability to easily add new features into existing Power Apps. As a result, there will less or no downtime of Power Apps. There will be no impact on the business processes.
Easy to Understand: Microsoft Power Apps provides a rich designer view which is very easy to understand by business users and operations teams.
Easy to Maintain: VNB provided training for the customer' team on Power Apps development. The team feels that Power Apps are easier to build, maintain and carry out any updates if required. Customer team is well-versed with Power Apps development process now and they are comfortable to make any changes to the app, if required, in near future.
Easily Accessible Patient Data directly integrated with EHR: With the integration of Power Apps, Care provider can easily and quickly view the historical prescriptions and diagnostics reports.
Ease of use: Power Apps based solution is easy to use for the users
In-house training for additional implementations for other modules
