Northern Health cuts virtual emergency registration time by 93% with Power Platform

Based in Melbourne’s outer northern suburbs, Northern Health serves a diverse community with acute, maternity, sub-acute, mental health, specialist, community, and home-based health services. These are provided online and through five main campuses, including Northern Hospital Epping and Broadmeadows Hospital, with more than 110,000 people treated each year in emergency departments alone.

The area’s population is growing rapidly, with around 290,000 more people expected by 2036. This will drive up demand for services and place additional pressure on Northern Health’s ‘front door’ of care – patient registration and referral intake. To stay ahead, the organization is exploring common-sense innovations that could reduce patient delays and staff fatigue.

“Access, flow, and timely care aren’t just metrics for us – they are integral to our mission,” says James Pownall, Director of Digital Innovation at Northern Health. “If registration creates delays, we fail before we’ve even started clinical care. That’s why we prioritized intake automation, because it’s foundational to everything we do.” 

Northern Health has responded by implementing governed automation using Microsoft Power Platform, which has been integrated with Microsoft Azure and uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect to other core systems. Pownall’s team has first focused on the more achievable, less complex problems – the automatable, high-repetition tasks that can consume employees’ time.

The aim is to make essential clinical administration as efficient and sustainable as possible to support critical frontline workers already operating at their limit.

“We have world-class clinicians who were constrained by legacy processes that hadn’t evolved with demand. The question wasn’t effort – it was architecture,” says Pownall. “We needed workflows that matched the scale and complexity of modern healthcare delivery.”

Expediting registration for those in need

Northern Health operates a virtual service called the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department (VVED), which diverts non-critical presentations from hospitals while maintaining safe, timely care. “When we match patients to the right care setting, we improve outcomes while preserving physical ED capacity for those who need it,” says Pownall. 

Previously, VVED intake and the process of matching patients to any existing records relied on employees acting as ‘human middleware,’ hopping arduously between an external registration portal, the patient administration system, and electronic medical records to register presentations.

Northern Health has introduced orchestrated automation to assist those employees. Within its solution, Power Automate desktop bots and cloud flows are used to match and register patients, with Azure APIs connecting the in-house registration platform to core systems. When matching isn’t conclusive, a Power Apps experience flags the exception for staff to resolve.

The impact has already been profound. Registrations, which could exceed 20 minutes at peak times, are now consistently under 90 seconds. That’s a big time saving for a service handling more than 300,000 patients each year.

Much of this success can be attributed to ongoing collaboration between the development team and frontline workers. To make the system transparent, Pownall and his team provided administrative staff with a live view of automated work in progress and the ability to restart flows if needed.

“We’ve given staff real-time visibility into automated workflows through a custom Power App,” says Pownall. “That’s built resilience and a new skill set because they’re managing an automated system for their work, not just managing the work itself. That’s a significant capability uplift, and it shows in the data. Registration duplication rates have dropped by two-thirds since implementation.”

Improving outpatient classification to remove delays

Northern Health’s outpatient system faced a similar issue in classifying GP referrals to the right specialty and creating corresponding referrals and appointments in downstream systems. Increasing volumes of these requests could significantly delay this process, sometimes over several days. 

That’s no longer the case. Using the same Power Automate, Power Apps, and Azure stack that underpins the VVED, the organization uses automation and pattern detection to automatically classify all referrals every 30 minutes throughout the day, correctly routing them and matching patients to existing records. As a result, patients have a far shorter wait before proceeding to the next stage of care. 

Pownall’s team also helped improve the system for creating appointments and referrals for specialist work. Clinicians now record a short note, and the system automatically carries out corresponding administrative actions overnight. In the most recent reporting period, that translated to almost 50,000 appointments and referrals, or approximately 20 per cent of Northern Health’s total volume, some of which may otherwise have gone unrecorded.

Crucially, team members using these new tools are enjoying the benefits of this improved efficiency. “Almost always, what happens is we automate something and then our employees get to do something of higher value. There tends to be pretty universal appreciation for it once it’s there,” says Pownall. “When processes are occasionally taken offline for maintenance, the most common reaction is disbelief that we ever managed those volumes manually.”

Capturing information for mental health patients

Microsoft technology is further assisting Northern Health with improving its mental health services. The organization must record every interaction, outcome measure, and assessment in this space, which previously meant staff had to retype details into multiple systems.

Northern Health has collapsed that burden into a single web experience for clinical and administrative notes. Power Automate routes entries to the relevant electronic medical record and transcribes them to a statewide Client Management Interface/Operational Data Store repository, cutting double-entry and reducing misses.

The team uses the solution to transcribe notes on more than 250,000 mental health interactions and thousands of clinical outcomes into the repository annually. Because more eligible activity is being recorded, this has contributed to a 14 per cent uplift in funding for the mental health division.

Clinicians can now also get useful context at a glance. Northern Health uses Azure services with its in-house customer relationship management system to quickly generate timelines of prior admissions and emergency department presentations – material that would otherwise take hours to assemble.

“One of the things that we give staff is this timeline that will provide a longitudinal view of admissions and emergency department presentations for patients with really complex episodes, which is incredibly useful for building immediate clinical situational awareness,” says Pownall.

Consolidating technology to evolve further

Northern Health plans to continue consolidating its product stack to improve visibility, retire overlaps, and maintain or improve the guardrails that have instilled employee trust. “While products can solve problems, platforms create problem-solving capacity,” says Pownall. “Power Platform is our backbone – it turns isolated tools into infrastructure that can evolve with our needs.”  

The organization remains focused on finding intuitive ways to deploy software to handle routine steps so staff can dedicate their time and skills to more complex cases, improving outcomes for Northern Health and its community.  

“We don’t see ourselves as simply automating tasks. We’re building technology that scales human expertise,” says Pownall. “That’s the difference between efficiency and transformation.”

Discover more about Northern Health on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.