As mentioned in previous posts, I’m fortunate to meet with many healthcare customers, and a use case that has come up quite a bit recently is solutions that help connect the right people together, when one of them may be “remote” and lack access to their regular applications. Some of these include:
- Mobile nurse requesting assistance from a physician (Nurse is external to network resources)
- EMT requesting ED physician (ET3 scenario)
- Physician to physician consult “nudge” (orders are in the EMR, requesting a live call)
The Microsoft cloud supports the full spectrum of solutions ranging from lightweight to very advanced. In this post we’ll focus primarily on getting started quickly with a lightweight solution, which can be enhanced over time as your needs grow.
This video minimizes the technology footprint, making use of a Teams Conference call and a low-code front-end to make request and creation of the meeting easy-breezy (and has a quick time to implement). In the recording, I cover:
- Configure Teams
- Using a Tag in a Teams channel
- Alternatives like Group chat
- Configure a Power Virtual Agent
- Create a dedicated bot (from scratch) for this use case
- Gather information from the nurse
- Configure the automation to set the meeting and notify the right people
- Deploy and share
- Web channel, Teams, Mobile app
Note: There are links to resources called out in the video (scroll past the video).
Enhancements & additional resources
Virtual Appointment API – this related HLS blog post shows the use of this API in the context of another use case (and has a link to GitHub for a sample connector). This was mentioned in the video as a way to allow the Nurse to join from a mobile browser without downloading/logging into Teams.
Power Virtual Agents Channels – official documentation about the available channels and securely deploying to channels of engagement.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service – relevant HLS blog post which discusses the use of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, as well as how this can be used with Practitioner data for search and routing.
Final thoughts
It’s worth noting that this is geared toward more of a “B2B” situation, and other approaches would be used for customer virtual visit requests.
If you are interested in a follow-up video where I add some of those more advanced configurations, please let me know. I make these as a response to what I hear from our customers and partners!
