In October 2020, Microsoft released Cloud for Healthcare as its first Industry Cloud offering.  This cloud solution empowers our healthcare focused partners and customers to rapidly develop business and clinical applications on Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft’s low code/no code solution platform.  This capability now lives under Microsoft’s Health and Life Sciences portfolio as Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform.

In this post, we will discuss key elements of Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform and kick off a series that highlights how to leverage Healthcare Data Solutions to build Healthcare solutions on Power Platform.

What’s included in Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform?

As the name states, our Healthcare Data Solutions in Power Platform is founded in Power Platform.  This means we have many platform capabilities available on which to build enterprise business applications like Dataverse and Power Automate.  A fundamental goal of Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform is to accelerate development of healthcare business applications by providing reusable healthcare focused tools and components. This platform helps customers in modernization efforts, improve standardization across solutions, and reduce time to value during implementation.

Healthcare data model for Dataverse

Healthcare applications often center on managing patient data.  To ensure compatibility across data centric solutions, we chose the HL7 FHIR® standard as our model and built a FHIR-aligned relational data model designed for Dataverse.

This model contains a subset of FHIR resources needed for Microsoft and partner healthcare applications and can be customized using the existing Dataverse maker portal tools. Aligning with the FHIR standard positions Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform for enterprise interoperability needs.

Healthcare template applications

, Once you install the Healthcare data model for Dataverse.  you can start building model driven apps on our healthcare data model from scratch.  We also provide template applications based on common use cases that demonstrate how to build healthcare apps in Power Platform.  Patient outreach, Care management, Patient service center, and Patient access are some examples of our template available applications.

These templates are starting points to building your own targeted solutions.  You may customize the data model, application definitions, forms and views without any coding. If your requirements demand it, you can also extend these solutions with custom code. If starting from scratch, you can still use existing components from the template applications like preconfigured forms and custom Power Apps component framework (PCF) controls.

Dataverse Healthcare API

Enterprise healthcare systems often require interoperability with existing systems and the Dataverse Healthcare APIs is one option supporting this requirement. Because the data model is FHIR based, these API support FHIR bundle processing – ingestion to create/update Dataverse records and writeback to create/update data on FHIR services like Azure Health Data Services.

Entity and attribute mapping rules for ingestion and writeback are configurable by system administrators, so they can be customized should you update the FHIR data model.

Virtual Health Data Tables

If interoperability is required but you prefer not to synchronize data between systems, you can leverage Virtual Health Data Tables.  This custom virtual table provider uses the same entity and attribute maps as our APIs to transform FHIR data into Dataverse records.  However, when this data is requested by the user in the model driven app, our custom provider instead retrieves the related records from Azure Health Data Services FHIR services and does not persist it in Dataverse. This means saving on storage costs and complexity of data synchronization.

FHIRlink Power Platform connector

Additional interoperability support comes with FHIRlink, our Power Platform connector supporting direct connectivity with Azure Health Data Services FHIR services, Google Cloud™ for HL7® FHIR®, and Epic® on FHIR®.  Using FHIRlink, you can build Power Platform canvas apps, Power Automate flows, and Azure logic apps removing the need to synchronize data between different systems.

Get started today

It’s worth noting that there is no additional cost for this solution.  Once you purchase Power Platform licenses, you can install Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform components.  You can find all Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform components at the Microsoft Solution Center.

Up Next

In the coming months, we will be posting more on how to configure and build healthcare applications using Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform.  In the meantime, we would love to hear more about your real-world stories and requirements in the comments section below!

What is Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/healthcare/overview

Manage and explore health data

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/healthcare/data-management

FHIRlink

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/fhirlink

FHIR®, Google and Epic® are registered trademarks owned, respectively, by Health Level Seven International and Epic Systems Corporation. Use of these trademarks on this page does not constitute endorsement by Health Level Seven International or Epic Systems.

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