Common Ground: A Case Study

Common Ground: A Case Study Towards Use of Power Apps and SharePoint for a Centralized Digital Patient Care Coordination Platform

About Common Ground

Common Ground is the product of a 1998 merger of two agencies, Common Ground and The Sanctuary, Inc., that had served Oakland County, USA, since the early 1970s. Common Ground was founded in 1971 by a group of students, parents, and community leaders concerned about increased substance abuse and suicide among young people. They aim to provide a lifeline for individuals and families in crisis, victims of crime, persons with mental illness, and people trying to cope with critical situations. They offer a 24-hour crisis services agency dedicated to helping youths, adults, and families in crisis and providing service to more than 80,000 people annually.

Manual Registration Hurdles that made Common Ground reach us

Our client understood the complex and time-sensitive challenges of delivering meaningful care to its patients and their families. The healthcare organization knew it needed to transform the manual paper-based patient registration and tracking process into a digital and centralized platform to better coordinate patient care delivery. This would improve the clinicians’ daily work experience and enable them to be more responsive and present to deliver critical care to the right patient when most needed.

A Brief of Challenges Faced by Common Ground

Their challenges were:

• They manually managed and tracked all patients and their details in Excel sheets.
• Everything was done manually, which took much of their productive time and energy.
• Human error was another big concern.
• Excel sheets could not meet the desired security and privacy settings.

They desperately felt the need for a single solution that would make their lives easier.

Microsoft Cloud Technology, SharePoint and Power Apps as Solutions

Our team at Evolvous explored the possible opportunities for digital transformation with Microsoft Cloud technologies and ensured that our client, Common Ground, uses the best technology and tools to help optimize clinicians’ work experiences. We recognized they needed a solution based on Microsoft Power Apps and shifted the operations to a cloud-based environment.

How have Power Apps made Common Ground more efficient?

Experts at Evolvous designed and developed a web-based application using responsive Power Apps for

• managing and tracking patient information,
• their status,
• logging information and
• Their concerns with SharePoint Online as a backend database.

Impacts of using Power Apps and SharePoint

Common Ground made an essential step towards digital transformation with improved experience and productivity. The application helped them optimize operations and drive efficiency.

Now they can:

• Directly manage and track all patient details in the application using simple filter options.
• Teams are more productive as they can focus on patient care delivery.
• The central database organized data storage, with SharePoint Online as the backend database.
• Security and privacy concerns were met with exclusive access management settings.
• Everything being on the cloud, real-time collaboration and versioning are no longer challenging.

Key Performance Indicator Metrics



76+

Counties Impacted



36%

Higher Productivity



78%

Lower Security Risks