Power Apps has been gaining significant attention in the healthcare industry lately—and for good reason. Its low-code platform makes it accessible and easy to use right from the start, allowing healthcare organizations to improve patient care through custom applications. By leveraging Power Apps, healthcare providers can simplify the lives of both patients and physicians.
What is MS Power Apps?
What would you say if I told you that regardless of their prior coding experience, anyone could nowadays create unique business applications?
If you struggle to believe me, let me tell you about this newly developed tool called Power Apps developed by Microsoft. Power Apps is an important component of Microsoft Power Platform and serves as a low-code SaaS environment.
It provides a wide range of data connectors and databases enabling the development of highly customizable business applications tailored to the exact needs of your company or organization.
Ah, and by the way, Power Apps offers a high degree of flexibility and scalability, meaning that you can create apps that suit every branch of your company, regardless of the number of employees in each branch.
However, when it comes down to what matters most, it’s undoubtedly cost reduction.
Power Apps is an excellent tool to help achieve this goal. Whether by retiring old maintenance-heavy applications, by not having to purchase supplementary software or simply saving time by increasing efficiency by the apps. So now without further ado, let´s explore the first common use case for Power Apps of our series.
Healthcare - Patient Management System
Challenges
Have you ever wondered how hospitals and clinics work? How do physicians manage their patient's data effectively? The number of challenges they face is tremendous, among which are the following:
Enhancing emergency response:
Responding quickly to patient emergencies is crucial in healthcare. Power Apps enables the creation of applications that establish efficient communication channels with patients, monitor their health, and facilitate timely responses in emergencies.
Adequate resource management:
The recent COVID pandemic highlighted how quickly healthcare resources can become overwhelmed. Power Apps allows you to monitor, manage, and execute key resource management tasks efficiently.
By integrating with Power Automate and Power BI, you can further enhance your management capabilities.
However, there are also issues for patients:
Long waiting times and opacity of medical records:
Patients often experience long waiting times during check-in, appointments, and billing. This can lead to frustration and a negative overall experience. Additionally, patients may struggle to access their medical records, lab results and other important information regarding their health when they need it.
For every one of these challenges, Power Apps provides a solution.
App solutions
How to tackle these challenges? Let´s talk though possible app solutions for every presented challenge.
Physicians
Enhancing emergency response:
Access Patient Information on the Go – Having easy access to patient records in one place will help in delivering the right treatment and reduce response times. Often medical institutions have a centralized repository of the data, but they can’t be accessed freely. With Power Apps, you can make the data accessible on phones or other mobile devices with ease. This way doctors can check the medical history of the patients, whenever they want and wherever they are.
Adequate resource management:
Manage Medical Equipment – The equipment at your medical institution is just as crucial as your staff. With Power Apps, you can
build an app to track equipment usage and monitor the availability of the staff managing it.
The app can also help you keep track of maintenance schedules and send you reminders when maintenance is due. Plus, it can alert you immediately if equipment breaks down, so you can quickly send out repair teams.
Patients
Long waiting times and opacity of medical records:
With Power Apps, we can build an app with many self-service features that provides convenience to patients who can access it anytime. Physicians can provide portals and clinical applications that patients can use to book appointments, download test results, and interact with staff.
Additionally, physicians might even provide customized dashboards that can display the patients' medical history, current treatment plans and upcoming appointments.
Licensing Models
Power Apps offers two main subscription options:
1. Per App Plan
This plan is ideal for smaller organizations focused on developing a limited number of apps. It provides access to a single app or portal at a fixed cost of approximately €5 to €10 per user per month, making it a cost-effective choice for specific, targeted needs.
2. Per User Plan
The Per User Plan is well-suited for larger organizations, such as those in the healthcare sector, looking to deploy a wide range of apps across various departments. Costs typically range from €20 to €40 per user per month, with the final price influenced by factors such as basic versus premium features, potential volume discounts, and contract duration.
Recommendation:
Healthcare organizations should base their decision on which licensing model to choose by considering both their headcount and the specific Power Apps features they require. For organizations with clearly defined needs and a limited number of apps, the Per App Plan may be the more cost-effective choice. Larger organizations intending to deploy a variety of apps across multiple departments should consider the Per User Plan.
Conclusion
Power Apps is a great development tool, that has the potential to solve many of the tedious tasks that occur within a business or an organization. Accordingly, I strongly recommend checking out the set of features and exploring its potential.
You don’t need to be a coding expert to create a comprehensive patient management application. In the healthcare use case presented, we saw how Power Apps can be used to simplify patient record maintenance, appointment scheduling, and overall physician-patient communication.
Power Apps can be adapted across a wide range of industries, from healthcare to finance, manufacturing and beyond. In the second part of this series, we'll explore its potential on inventory management.
