Our response to Covid-19
LEARN MORE

The Virtual Fracture Clinic

PowerObjects CRM Case Study
The Virtual Fracture Clinic

The Virtual Fracture Clinic worked with PowerObjects to implement Dynamics 365 and deploy a robust CRM portal to manage patient needs.

Challenge

Before Dynamics 365, VFC was utilizing tools found in the wider Microsoft stack, with a heavy reliance on Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Outlook. They needed a solution that would be housed in one central location.

Solution

VFC decided to go with an online implementation of Dynamics 365 to make it easier to roll out to other hospitals as a cloud-based service.

Key Benefits

VFC's patients now have access to a robust CRM to help themselves and their health providers provided better care, they decided to go with an online implementation of Dynamics 365 to make it easier to roll out to other hospitals as a cloud-based service.

Summary

Before Dynamics 365, VFC was utilizing tools found in the wider Microsoft stack, with a heavy reliance on Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Outlook. The VFC communication team set up an online referral form that would be downloaded and filed to Excel daily. They also managed their patient tracking via Excel. “Excel wasn’t really ideal when you’ve got more than one person working on it,” expresses Cassidy. “It’s also not great because if you accidentally delete a cell, that information is gone forever and you don’t know sometimes that you’ve even deleted it.”

For patient information, VFC used Outlook templates to email patients links to videos and PDFs for written documentation. For patients who did not have an email, however, this process was completed via mail, which meant VFC was utilizing multiple platforms. “I was really, really keen to get a CRM system so that we could accurately track everything that we do,” says Cassidy. “Our process before was clunky, and it’s much better to have one portal that we can build that hopefully in the future other hospitals can also access and use that same information to reduce any replication of work.”

VFC wanted a CRM platform to be the model adopted by other hospitals as best practice. “Other hospitals are saying, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is really cool. We want to do that,’” says Cassidy. “We found that if we had this platform it would mean that the system could be adopted more easily and, for our physiotherapists that are running the Virtual Fracture Clinic, it’s easier for them to be able to choose a diagnosis automatically to link the correct protocol to the patients. Less user error using the platform.”

I was just really attracted to the fact that you can configure Dynamics CRM to do pretty much anything you like. It’s an easy language, it’s not coding, which lets us actually make small adaptions ourselves. Once it’s up and running, we’re quite independent with regards to updating our information.

 - Lucy Cassidy, Advanced Practice Physiotherapist

Solution

After looking at several options, VFC decided to go with Microsoft Dynamics 365. “I was just really attracted to the fact that you can configure it to do pretty much anything you like. It’s an easy language, it’s not coding, which lets us actually make small adaptions ourselves,” says Cassidy. “Once it’s up and running, we’re quite independent with regards to updating our information.”

VFC decided to go with an online implementation of Dynamics 365 to make it easier to roll out to other hospitals as a cloud-based service rather than have other hospitals add to their current user licenses.

One of the biggest solutions that VFC is implementing is a CRM portal. The portal is set to launch in 2017 and is projected to manage approximately 100 referrals a week for the first six months. After the imbedding phase, this number is expected to double and VFC will be looking to configure the system to integrate with other hospital software platforms, which will auto-populate patient demographics to result in both time and cost savings.

Key Benefits

VFC has seen extensive benefits from their CRM portal, especially on the patient end. “It’s a much more polished service. I think if I was a patient and I got a YouTube video, a survey and an email that half the time goes to spam, I don’t think I’d have much confidence in the service,” says Cassidy. “But for me to be able to go into a branded platform that looks like the NHS, I think does lot for patient confidence in the service.”

With the outcome measures, VFC can continue to do ongoing research in terms of specific injuries and recoveries. Since they have all the data stored in CRM, they can continue their research on how virtual models can manage patients with specific injuries as well as chart demographics in terms of reach of patients, age and their interactions.

VFC uses survey to better understand the voice of the customer. “With regards to orthopedics it’s really important to know that our patients are getting better from their injuries, so we’ve set it up so that at day zero they get sent an outcome measure that they fill in as if it was the day before their injury,” says Cassidy. “Then, CRM automatically triggers an email to send them that same outcome measure at six weeks, at three months, at twelve months, and finally a survey to collect patient satisfaction on how they feel that the service works for them.”

The emails include direct links that take patients to the correct location in their portal. “I like that fact that on the CRM side we can actually measure user engagement. We can see if they are opening the documents that we put in their file. We can see if they’re doing their surveys, and we can send prompts or reminders if they’re not doing it. I think that that’s really great,” says Cassidy. VFC uses PowerObjects’ suite of PowerPack Add-ons for Dynamics 365, which add functionality to the CRM component. PowerPacks used include:

PowerEmail: PowerEmail sends automatic emails based on the triggering of the first trigger emails from a referral. When VFC receives a referral, the first email is triggered by PowerEmail, and then there’s a series of email triggers that are set up for the surveys and the outcome measures.

PowerGrid: Because VFC receives numerous referrals daily, they needed something that would let them view all referrals instead of having to open every referral individually to go through and look at the cases. PowerGrid brings the referrals into a grid format so VFC can view the cells that are relevant to them in order to make a diagnosis. Patient information is entered into PowerGrid while a consultant is reviewing a case, without having to go into every individual case.