ADH Clinic is a solo-venture massage, physical, and remedial therapy business based in Taunton in the United Kingdom (UK). Founded in 2000 by accomplished practitioner Andrea Douthwaite-Hodges, the clinic had successfully been supporting patients in the Somerset area until March 2020. That’s when COVID-19 lockdown restrictions prevented Douthwaite-Hodges from seeing her patients.
She was faced with the loss of her family’s primary income, the uncertainty of how long COVID restrictions would be in place, and concerns about how ADH Clinic would meet the new regulations. Ultimately, Douthwaite-Hodges found a way forward with the help of friends and Microsoft Power Platform.
Digitally transforming her business with Power Platform helped Douthwaite-Hodges' clinic to not only re-open safely and survive the pandemic but to thrive and grow as never before.
Turning adversity into an opportunity to transform the business
After the United Kingdom went into complete lockdown in reaction to the COVID-19 global pandemic, Douthwaite-Hodges’ concern was two-fold. When would she be able to get back to work? And how could she do so safely?
In addition to deciding that she would completely revamp her clinic with the latest equipment that could be entirely washed down and sanitized to meet all COVID-19 regulations (with the savings from a “mortgage holiday” and a loan from a friend), she wanted to find out if technology could help. So, she turned to her close friends Taiki Yoshida, Microsoft employee and passionate Power Platform Community member, and Chris Ma, a Musical Director in London’s West End.
They saw an opportunity for Douthwaite-Hodges to not only use technology to help her get back to work safely but to convert her business into the way of working she had always dreamed of.
Douthwaite-Hodges had been using a diary as it’s referred to in the UK—a calendar notebook—to manage appointments and take notes for her patients. She took all bookings by phone, which often meant multiple back-and-forth voicemails. Medical and consent forms, physiotherapy exercises, and all the other material she needed on a day-to-day basis were on paper stored in folders. That meant that sometimes she had to flip back and forth through various papers to find previous treatments and the corresponding notes.
Despite Douthwaite-Hodges' self-professed distrust and aversion to technology, she wanted to streamline how she ran her business and had tried a client management system (CMS) in the past. But she found it too difficult to use and not tailored for her needs. “I had a CMS system before … It just didn’t work for me, so I still relied on manual notes because I didn’t like the system,” says Douthwaite-Hodges.
Yoshida and Ma explained that she could gain the efficiency she desired with Power Platform and that the digital tools would be easy for her and her patients to use. Plus, because it’s a low-code platform, Yoshida and Ma would be able to quickly create the solutions Douthwaite-Hodges needed. Douthwaite-Hodges and her two friends partnered to address two key areas with Power Platform:
Streamline appointment booking and the patient intake process with an automated system that patients could access on the clinic’s website.
Build a single source of truth for all of Douthwaite-Hodges’ information needs, automate the flow of information into this central repository, and create a user-friendly interface for her to access the data.
Saving practitioner’s and patients’ time with online appointment booking
An online booking system was created using Microsoft Bookings. For patients, the ADH Clinic experience starts with Douthwaite-Hodges' revamped website. There, they can select a treatment and their desired appointment time from her available slots. They fill in their contact details and automatically receive an email confirming their booking. And if they have Microsoft Outlook, the appointment is automatically blocked in their Outlook calendar. The email also contains a link for patients to manage their booking—a well-loved feature that gives patients the autonomy to reschedule or cancel their own bookings at the click of a button.
“My CEOs and managers that book in, they say to me, ‘It’s amazing, it’s so efficient’,” says Douthwaite-Hodges. “The ease of use and the ability to self-process without the need for a conversation is essential for those with a busy diary.”
A native feature in Microsoft Bookings is its ability to sync to an Outlook Exchange calendar. That means any changes in Douthwaite-Hodges' calendar affect the available slots for patients to book, and any bookings on the website automatically go into Douthwaite-Hodges' calendar.
Microsoft Bookings also helped Douthwaite-Hodges to automatically manage her schedule so she had enough time in between patients to do a full cleaning of the clinic and change into a new uniform—which could take her up to 40 minutes—to comply with COVID regulations. It contains an out-of-the-box provision for preventing back-to-back bookings by providing configurable downtime between each booking.
Additional features in Bookings allow Douthwaite-Hodges to:
Set up automated reminders with a customized link to the medical information form.
Edit the names and descriptions of services and add extra services that patients can book.
Set the minimum lead time for patients to book appointments to ensure she will be available.
See the quantity of bookings at a glance, which gives her visibility into how well the clinic is doing and whether she needs to send out some gentle reminders to patients to try to hit her personal bookings targets.
“For the first time ever, I saw what was happening in real time,” says Douthwaite-Hodges. “What was really interesting was that I could see the estimated revenue and compare it to my goal; it was a visual reminder and rather than having to go through my diary, the information was just there for me.” Increasing efficiency with automated patient forms
Patient forms were automated using Microsoft Forms and Power Automate. Eliminating paper medical forms not only increased efficiency for Douthwaite-Hodges and her patients but helped reduce COVID risk since there would be less nonessential face-to-face time and papers being passed back and forth between her and her patients. Once patients have booked an appointment, they are sent a link to an online medical form. The form gives Douthwaite-Hodges all the information she needs prior to an individual arriving for treatment. “The beauty of this is that it gives me an immediate set of information, and because everyone’s answering the same questions, it’s now in one format,” says Douthwaite-Hodges. “It’s just made my life so much easier.” The responses from the digital medical form are gathered automatically by a Power Automate cloud flow, which adds the response data into Microsoft Dataverse. If the response comes from a patient who is already in the system, the medical details are automatically linked to that patient. If there is no match, a new patient is created in the system and the medical details are linked to the new patient.
Left: Intake form powered by Microsoft Forms; Right: Power Automate cloud flow – copies form data into Dataverse. Note: No real-life personal data is displayed in any screenshots; all data shown is for illustration purposes only.
Easily managing patient information with unified views and an intuitive interface
Patients’ medical information is automatically moved into a model-driven application that was created using Power Apps. It sits on top of Dataverse, surfaces the information Douthwaite-Hodges needs, and makes it easy for her to create and update her records.
The out-of-the-box relational capabilities of Dataverse enable data to be represented from different perspectives. What that means for Douthwaite-Hodges is that she can easily see everything pertaining to one patient, but also see all medication records across her entire client base, for example.
Power Apps model-driven application used to view and manage all patient details and activities Note: No real-life personal data is displayed in any screenshots; all data shown is for illustration purposes only.
Douthwaite-Hodges can quickly and easily access patient information and update records with a user-friendly, intuitive layout. For example, the patient record page includes a patient’s contact information and a timeline populated with:
Appointments—past and upcoming
Notes from their appointments
Emails sent to and received from that patient
Details of calls made to that patient
Any SOAP (Subject, Object, Action, Plan) items that Douthwaite-Hodges wishes to capture throughout the patient’s time with her
“Because of the way the information is available, I can scan through and the system gives me the ability to see patterns more easily and more readily,” says Douthwaite-Hodges.
Additionally, the selected patient’s responses to the medical form are available, along with:
Payment information so Douthwaite-Hodges can manage payments and immediately spot any missing payments.
Medication reference so she can be aware of what medications her patients are taking, when their medications change, and cross-reference this information—along with her knowledge of drugs and their common side-effects—with any changes in their symptoms or overall health.
Medical contacts so Douthwaite-Hodges knows who she needs to get in touch with to ensure that any treatments she is administering will not conflict with what the patient is getting provided from their general practitioners (GPs).
Douthwaite-Hodges also has, in her model-driven app, her own personal COVID Track & Trace solution, which holds every bit of data about who has been in the clinic, when, and whether they were a patient or a visitor (for example someone delivering equipment to the clinic).
“The beauty of the system is that it means that with regard to COVID safety, I’ve got a double security layer: I’ve got Track & Trace from the NHS (National Health Service), but I’ve also got my own failsafe version because I’m more comfortable with that,” says Douthwaite-Hodges.
High level solution architecture diagram for the patient management system. Note: No real-life personal data is displayed in any screenshots; all data shown is for illustration purposes only.
Re-opening safely with more time to focus on patients
Just three months after she first spoke with Yoshida and Ma about the challenges she was facing, Douthwaite-Hodges was able to go back to work with her Power Platform digital solutions in place, which helped her to not only re-open safely but achieve huge time savings. Since she no longer had to manually manage so many administrative tasks, her productivity and speed increased by 80 percent. By reducing the number of peripheral tasks on her plate, she has more time to focus on her patients, their care, and the safety of the clinic.
“The system created with Power Platform has given me everything I wanted,” says Douthwaite-Hodges. “I can upload effortlessly, and everything is just seamless now. I’m amazed at how much easier it makes things; it’s like having a built-in assistant.”
Douthwaite-Hodges has not only been able to get back to where she was, she’s already seeing the business grow in new directions because of her move into the digital world. Typically, a lot of her work is with the elderly, but having an automated booking system has brought a younger generation through Douthwaite-Hodges’ doors. Plus, she’s able to provide information to GPs, consultants, and hospitals in the format they expect. And that new level of professionalism is helping to drive additional business.
Expanding capabilities for further efficiency and visibility
As her familiarity with the application grows, Douthwaite-Hodges is understanding new ways Power Platform can help her. Together with Yoshida and Ma, she’s looking into expanding its capabilities.
Since Douthwaite-Hodges is self-employed, she needs to manually track and calculate her income, expenses, and tax payments, and is keen to automate those tasks with the system so everything is together in one place. Inspired by the at-a-glance booking statistics, Douthwaite-Hodges also wants to be able to see charts showing how well each service is doing, track the uptake on new treatments, and monitor her clinic’s growth and expansion.
Douthwaite-Hodges, Yoshida, and Ma turned the lockdown into a chance for ADH Clinic to grow and flourish. Digitally transforming her business with Power Platform hasn’t just helped Douthwaite-Hodges keep her clinic open during COVID, it has benefitted her patients, her business, and her own life. She hopes that her story can serve as an inspiration to others to know that Power Platform can help them quickly adapt whatever the challenge or goal.
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