Enhancing patient outreach using healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

In the healthcare industry, effective outreach strategies empower patients to remain closely involved in decisions regarding their health and thereby enable improved patient-provider relationships, better patient engagement, and reduced healthcare costs.

Patient outreach information is stored across different systems, often in silos, thereby making it difficult to leverage the data for deriving analytical insights. To simplify this process, we are thrilled to announce the public preview of Patient Outreach Analytics (POA) and general availability of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights- Data preparation (CID) in Healthcare Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric. These capabilities allow seamless exchange of outreach information between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Fabric, equipping data engineers and analysts to conduct efficient patient segmentation and gain rich insights about their outreach strategies.

Key features

CID and POA respectively allow the exchange and utilization of patient outreach information between Dynamics 365 applications and Microsoft Fabric.

CID simplifies the outreach information exchange from Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake to Dynamics 365 (D365) by preparing the complex FHIR-based resources for ingestion into D365 Customer Insights - Data and ensuring effortless creation of patient or member lists for outreach purposes. Without worrying about data compatibility or transforming heavily nested FHIR data for patient segmentation, you can:

• Streamline patient segmentation
• Improve your outreach strategies
• Understand your patient demographics better
• Grow your revenue faster

On the other hand, POA ensures efficient utilization of outreach information from D365 Customer Insights – Journeys within Microsoft Fabric. It is a configurable Power BI dashboard depicting insights about the influence of different outreach efforts on appointments by unifying appointment information from two key sources- patient journey data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and a clinical data source like FHIR. This enables you to understand information such as:

• The marketing journey’s success in influencing appointments.
• The marketing channel’s success in influencing appointments.
• The service lines and locations that are doing better or may need more help.

How CID works

The GA release of CID focuses on mapping 13 FHIR resources in OneLake to tables that Customer Insights – Data can ingest. The FHIR resources (e.g. Patient, Practitioner, Appointment, Encounter, etc.) were selected based on popular marketing journeys among healthcare organizations. You also need to configure an Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 storage account to connect OneLake and Customer Insights – Data.

Once you have completed the prerequisites, you can trigger the CID pipeline in Healthcare data solutions. This flattens the 13 FHIR resources in the silver lake into tables compatible for ingesting in Customer Insights – Data.

Next, head to your Customer Insights - Data environment & connect the pre-configured ADLS Gen2 storage account. You should be able to see the same set of tables here. Ingest the tables and follow a few more steps like setting up relationships between the tables. Now you are ready to utilize your OneLake FHIR data to build analytical capabilities within Customer Insights – Data.

How POA works

POA relies on Patient Outreach – Patient Journey (a healthcare app based on D365 Customer Insights – Journeys) and FHIR data as the main sources. The former requires Dataverse data about journeys, communication templates etc. and marketing analytics data such as emails sent to or received from the patient. The FHIR data originates from a FHIR server that is also connected to the Dataverse environment.

Once the data sources are connected to Microsoft Fabric, you can land the relevant tables into Healthcare data solutions as shortcuts. Then you can trigger the POA pipeline to ingest the tables into the bronze lake, and subsequently transform them into the Industry Data Model in the silver lake.

The final silver to gold notebook will produce a gold model that feeds the patient outreach analytics Power BI report. It showcases the key insights to determine the effectiveness of your marketing engagements for creating patient appointments, such as appointments scheduled, channel engagement, appointments influenced by channel engagement, and so on.

Get started today

The POA public preview & CID GA are available in healthcare data solutions for teams to start using today. To learn more about the necessary configurations needed to deploy the capabilities, please check out the official documentation for POA and CID.

FHIR® is a registered trademark of Health Level Seven International, registered in the U.S. Trademark Office, and is used with their permission.

Medical device disclaimer: Microsoft products and services (1) are not designed, intended or made available as a medical device, and (2) are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment. Customers/partners are responsible for ensuring solutions comply with applicable laws and regulations.