How a New York Hospital Used the YakChat Connector for Power Automate to Create Safe Patient/Family Communication
At a time when hospitals have to restrict visiting because of COVID-19, family engagement has never been more critical. It’s easy for patients to feel cut off from family and friends. And this can negatively impact their well-being and mental health. Families, too, need to be kept updated and kept engaged – but kept offsite to keep patients safe.
Recognizing the positive impact of regular patient/family contact, a well-known New York hospital set about building COVID-safe patient engagement into its day-to-day strategies.
The hospital already used Microsoft Teams across its departments and so wanted to utilize the platform for patient engagement. It would then be easy for patients to arrange video calls with their loved ones on the hospital’s portable devices.Â
Once a meeting was arranged, Microsoft Teams could then send participants a meeting invitation automatically via email. The email would include the date and time of the meeting, together with an access URL.Â
The Challenge
But there was a problem: Not every family member had access to Microsoft Teams or email, so meeting requests could not reach them.
A simple solution to this, hospital leaders decided, was to send the meeting requests by text message. SMS is a sure way to reach people, they agreed. Not only is it the most direct and immediate service, it’s a method of communication that most people have access to, know how to use and, what’s more, prefer.
And yet this raised further issues:Â
The hospital was shocked to discover that Microsoft Teams did not support SMS. It just was not possible for their patients to text directly from the MS Teams platform.
In addition, the meeting request URLs generated by Microsoft Teams can be lengthy: often longer than a text segment of 160 characters. And that causes issues on some phones.Â
The Solution: YakChat Connector for Power Automate
Fortunately, the hospital already knew that YakChat could integrate two-way SMS functionality directly into Microsoft Teams. The YakChat connector for cloud-flows in Power Automate therefore offered hospital managers a fast solution to their patient engagement problems.Â
With the YakChat connector, the hospital can link to YakChat’s services directly from Power Automate.Â
Because of this, they can incorporate SMS into their automated workflow processes in just minutes.
Now when a patient creates a Teams meeting, this triggers a Power Automate flow to perform the following actions:
- Extract the lengthy meeting URL from Microsoft Teams
- Condense the URL to an acceptable size for all phones
- Add the shortened link to a text message containing the meeting invite.
- Send the meeting invite by SMS to all meeting participants via YakChat.
- Send a post to the patient’s Teams session to notify them that their meeting invitation was sent successfully.
Participants can then join the meeting by simply clicking the link sent to them in the SMS meeting invitation.
Power Automate and YakChat: A Boost for the Patient Experience
Hospital leaders agree that Power Automate and YakChat play a core role in boosting the patient experience.
It can be easy for patients to feel isolated in hospital. And that’s particularly true at the moment, when they can’t have visitors as normal. Online meetings have made a real difference in helping patients and their families connect during the most trying of times.
Unsurprisingly, feedback from patients has been, without exception, extremely positive. And as every hospital manager is well aware, the best patient experiences are inextricably linked to the best health outcomes.Â
Using the YakChat Connector, Microsoft Teams and Power Automate form the Best Patient Experiences
You can set a small or a large trigger that works across your entire enterprise. Triggering events can be automated, scheduled, or instant. The YakChat connector for Power Automate works with Microsoft Teams. A single trigger can also automate multiple tasks. However you want your process to work, your workflow will run in the background and complete the repetitive tasks that suck up so much time.
Easy and Intuitive
Power Automate is intuitive to use. You can build your workflow from scratch or use the pre-made templates Microsoft provides. You can then create a workflow in minutes. It will act based on the conditions you set. You simply set up a trigger to respond to a specific event in your system/s.
your trigger might be the arrival of a new email from your boss. Power Automate will detect this event and kick-off the automation. In this case, sending a push notification to alert you to your boss’s email.
The YakChat Connector works with Power AutomateÂ
Power Automate can process forms and invoices faster and more economically. The YakChat connector for Power Automate Whether you start from a ready-made template or want to create a multi-step workflow across several apps and digital services from scratch, Power Automate helps you automate repetitive, day-to-day tasks and paperless processes quickly and easily. And the more automation you implement, the more time you’ll save. Then you can refocus your attention to where it’s needed most.Â
Hospital leaders agree that Power Automate and YakChat play a core role in boosting the patient experience.
It can be easy for patients to feel isolated in hospital. And that’s particularly true at the moment, when they can’t have visitors as normal. Online meetings have made a real difference in helping patients and their families connect during the most trying of times.
Unsurprisingly, feedback from patients has been, without exception, extremely positive. And as every hospital manager is well aware, the best patient experiences are inextricably linked to the best health outcomes.Â
