Your Healthcare’s response to IT failure praised by Microsoft   You are here: Home » News Detail

When Your Healthcare’s clinical system, delivered by a third party, went down on August 4th, 2022, clinical teams lost access to all clinical notes, a risk to both patient safety and service delivery.

The new system they developed and put in place, in less than two weeks, has been praised in a new report by Microsoft, and featured alongside digital projects across the health service.

When the extent of the IT failure was assessed, managing director Ed Montgomery, and IT leads Phil Montgomery and Ed Tombs, realised it might be weeks or months before they regained access to the system.

“We had a meeting with the lead nurses and started with a basic app which stored everything in SharePoint lists,” explains Ed Tombs, “and this started a process of every team asking for additional functionality.”

“We took this as a challenge,” explains Phil Montgomery, “and very quickly built out the core components we needed – appointments, referrals, notes, alerts.”

The team used a cloud-based platform by Microsoft, known as the Power Platform, which is designed so that software can be built with minimal coding.

“We had already done a lot of the work to enable the use of Power Platform, and putting data into the Microsoft platform,” says Ed Montgomery.
The Low-Code solution was such a success with clinical teams, that some clinicians asked if it could replace the original system.

“It’s because we were able to design it around the users, to their specific needs,” explains Ed Tombs. “Some of the advancements we built were really good for workflow.”

There were no recorded patient safety concerns relating to the original IT failure and the effect on service delivery was negligible.

When Your Healthcare’s clinical system was back up and running, it became clear that processes and features from the Low-Code solution could be integrated effectively.

Ed Montgomery explains: “There was so much efficiency we could pull out of the new system, especially in back-office. We’re looking at our longer-term strategy. It’s about how we enable our organisation to be more creative, with the right governance boundaries. There is so much capability with the individuals using the system to harness.

“At the system level – with partners – there is a lot we can do to enable appropriate flow. There are a lot of manual processes, like referrals, which we’re aiming to eradicate. We’re looking at our process flows to support better service for our patients, while collecting data and using that data. We have put this functionality in front of our clinical teams - they’re the ones who will make their services better.”

Low-Code in the NHS: Your Guide to Enabling Innovation, Reducing Administration, and Creating more time to provide care, is available to download here:
Low Code in the NHS - Whitepaper (microsoft.com)