Patient outreach architecture

Article
12/06/2023

Patient outreach is a solution that helps you engage patients and their family members in their care decisions. You can use patient outreach to:

Provide patients with personalized and relevant healthcare information using email, text, regular mail, or other channels.
Create and manage patient segments, campaigns, journeys, and events based on your communication goals and patient data.
Gather insights about your patients by bringing data from different sources together.
Optimize and personalize your patient engagement and loyalty.
Deliver convenient access to care and manage risks to patients and your organization.

Patient outreach is built on the capabilities of:

You can enhance the patient outreach capabilities by configuring solutions like Azure Health Data Services, Microsoft Teams for Healthcare, and Data integration toolkit.

Architecture

The following diagram shows the Patient Outreach building block solution architecture.

You can download a printable PDF of this solution architecture diagram.

The rest of this article discusses the component layers that compose the solution architecture layer.

Security

After proper license assignment and environment access granted to each user, you need to assign extra built-in security roles to users, owner teams or Microsoft Entra group teams to be able to access or operate in the app.

Marketing professional - Business
Event planner
Healthcare user or Healthcare Non-Clinical user
Sync admin for FHIR Healthcare user (when using the Data Integration Toolkit or any of its components).

For information on built-in security roles for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, see here.

You can find the design guidance for extending security components for Patient outreach at the implementation guidance .

User interface

The Patient Outreach is a model-driven patient campaign management application utilizing the Dynamics 365 Marketing solution. The model-driven app comes with prebuilt segments that can be used as communication templates and customized further based on patients and communication goals, as well creating dynamics segments.

Additionally you can extend and customize patient journey automations, patient campaign templates and events to your needs.

Data layer

Patient outreach can use segment-based and trigger-based patient journey automations, which allows organizations to orchestrate their workflows across patient touchpoints to automate repetitive tasks, allowing patients to get their information faster. Patient outreach solution provides you with ready-to-use journey templates that you can customize further based on care manager and outreach specialist needs. Those journey automations provide different samples that allow you to define your segments but also add, remove or edit existing steps within the workflow.

Depending on your scenario you might need to decide whether to use segment vs trigger based workflows. The following diagram guides you on this decision.

There are multiple approaches to patient engagement implementation. We'll discuss more of those approaches below.

Aproach 1: Dataverse data

Due to high volumes of data and costs to transfer, maintain, and store data in Dataverse, it isn't generally recommended for healthcare organizations to build segments based on data stored in Dataverse. However, this might make sense for small organizations, or those who have significant amounts of data in Dataverse for other applications.

Approach 2: Customer Insights segments (Preview)

“Customer Insights – Data” enables the customer to segment on data residing in a Data Lake without bringing that data into Dataverse. This approach is recommended for segmentation, as it isn't possible to segment on virtual tables in “Customer Insights – Journeys.”

Note

Solution will enable ingestion of the below resources via Microsoft Health Data Solutions (Microsoft Fabric)

Note

Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place. Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize their disparate healthcare data in a single unified store where analytics and AI workloads can operate at scale. Leveraging the native capabilities of the platform, health organizations can create connected experiences at each point of care, empower their workforce, and unlock value from clinical and operational data. Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview and you can find more information here. Well-Architected for Industry documentation will be updated in a future release to include Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.

It's possible to branch and personalize on segments and profile attributes, but not on activities. The solution is to create a segment based on activities. Sample journeys based on Segments created from the above resources:

Sample	Diagram
Sample Journey 1
Sample Journey 2
Sample Journey 3

Approach 3: Health virtual data table triggers

For real-time marketing scenarios, the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare roadmap includes support for triggers based on virtual tables, so customers can define their triggers based on external data. As this is still a new scope, there are limitations such as virtualizing which is currently out of scope. Customers therefore need to bring this data into Dataverse.

Shipped out-of-the-box virtual data triggers only work on virtual tables using Azure FHIR servers. Customers can use virtual tables data on journey branch evaluations. To do so they have to bind the virtual tables entity reference to the custom trigger attribute so it can be accessed in the journey designer.

Since contacts need to be brought into Dataverse with this approach, their attributes can be referenced for personalization.

List of virtual entities:

Entity	Personalization
encounter	Out-of-the-box
allergyintolerance	Out-of-the-box
episode of care	Out-of-the-box
observation	Out-of-the-box
condition	Out-of-the-box
procedure	Out-of-the-box
medication request	Out-of-the-box
appointment (future)	Partially virtualized
location (future)	TBD

Example:

Send a personalized text message to a patient after an observation is created or updated.

Analytics

Patient outreach comes with ready-to-use extensible Power BI dashboards that can help you analyze your campaigns and events by providing rich data about their performance and engagements. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provide a built-in and extensible Patient 360-degree screen view which is combined natively with Power BI dashboards.

Business logic

With Patient outreach you can drive operational revenue back into your healthcare system by engaging patients in a more personalized manner. You can optimize and personalize patient engagement, enable loyalty through stronger patient relations, deliver convenient access to care and manage risks to patients and the institution.

It enables healthcare providers to reach out to their patients in a targeted and efficient way, using mail, text, or other channels. By creating and managing patient segments, marketing campaigns, patient journeys, and virtual events, providers can deliver personalized and relevant healthcare information to specific groups of patients.

Some of the scenarios and key capabilities are described below:

Scenario	Description
Patient experiences	Provide patients with personalized healthcare experiences and keep them engaged with current treatments by using various communication methods such as email, text, push notifications, etc.
Patient insights	Gather insights about patients by bringing data from different sources together using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data.
Patient segmentation	Prebuilt patient segments to provide baseline patient cohorts.
Patient journey automation	Create a model that helps you guide the members of a selected marketing segment by using automated messaging, activity generation, interactive decision points and more.
Patient campaign management	Create healthcare-specific email campaigns that use prebuilt patient segments and/or email templates.
Event management	Create and manage events with provider and payor event management templates for event administration and registration.

Sample Segment-based Patient Journey:

Download a printable PDF of this solution architecture diagram.

The following diagram shows how you can use event management with patient outreach solution.