HIPAA-Compliant Provider-to-Provider Telehealth Platform for Scalable Behavioral Care Delivery

About Our Client

The Client is a leading provider of telehealth services in the field of behavioral health to hospitals, emergency departments, outpatient clinics, and other healthcare facilities. It has over 200 certified specialists and operates 24/7/365 across North America.

Client’s Challenge

The Client's proprietary platform was originally developed to support scheduling, secure communication, and telehealth consult workflows. However, due to rapid business growth and the acquisition of multiple behavioral health organizations, the platform struggled to scale and meet evolving demands. Compounding the issue, the solution was custom-built with no access to the original developers, making ongoing support impossible. It also didn’t cover all the required workflows. To address these challenges, the Client needed to transition to an established, scalable platform that includes prebuilt healthcare capabilities and complies with industry regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH. The goals were to increase operational efficiency, minimize manual coordination, improve data accessibility, optimize service delivery, and lower associated costs. Given the pace of growth, a rapid transition was critical.

Solution

To support the Client’s Provider-to-Provider virtual care services, ScienceSoft is developing a HIPAA-compliant telehealth management platform based on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The solution leverages Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform to streamline virtual consultations, care coordination, and partner relationship management.

The platform supports virtual consultation requests from hospitals, outpatient clinics, and other providers. It is tailored to behavioral health workflows and can be integrated with partners' EHRs (Epic, Cerner, etc.) and portals via HL7 v2.x.

Core Functional Modules

Telehealth workflow automation:

Built on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and extended with PowerApps and Power Automate, the module manages care coordination and virtual consultations. Requests can be received via a partner portal, EHR, or manual entry. Care coordinators verify and assign requests to specialists, who conduct virtual consultations within the timelines stipulated by the agreements with partner providers. The virtual consultations are securely streamed to the healthcare partner’s devices on-site.

Partner relationship management:

Powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, the solution supports partner acquisition and onboarding, account and contact management, opportunity tracking, and sales documentation.

Data platform:

Leveraging Microsoft Azure for secure, scalable healthcare data storage and processing, and Microsoft Dataverse for structured data management, the platform consolidates partner records, consultation data, patient information, and clinical notes into a centralized repository. It supports multi-source data ingestion from partner EHRs, portals, and other systems, while automated transformation pipelines standardize and prepare the data for real-time reporting, advanced analytics, and regulatory compliance audits.

Business analytics:

Microsoft Power BI provides real-time insights on consultation volumes, SLA compliance, staff performance, and other KPIs.

Workflow Overview

• A patient either visits a physician at a medical center (which is a partner of the Client) or is already undergoing treatment there.
• The physician determines that the patient requires a consultation with a specialist. They access the portal and submit a consultation request, indicating the urgency and the reason. Alternatively, if the medical center's EHR system (e.g., Epic, Cerner, Meditech) is integrated with the telehealth platform, the physician can submit the request directly via the EHR, which is transmitted to the platform through HL7 v2.x integration. In cases where digital submission is unavailable, the medical center's administrative staff may call or fax the request to the virtual care provider, and a care coordination team member enters it manually into the system.
• A member of the care coordination team receives the request, confirms the necessary details with the requesting physician (e.g., whether the patient and device are ready for the consultation), and assigns the case to an available specialist.
• The specialist conducts the virtual consultation within the timeframe defined in the SLA for the requesting medical center. The call is directed to the medical center's device, not to the patient's device. Consultation types may include patient assessment, treatment planning, progress monitoring, and more.
• The specialist issues a medical conclusion, noting the necessity of follow-up consultations. This information is documented both in the medical center's EHR and within the telehealth management platform.

Architecture and Security Highlights

• To support the Client's need for rapid deployment, the solution is designed with an incremental migration approach and component-based architecture.
• The modular structure allows fast onboarding of newly acquired entities and flexible scaling to support continued business growth.
• Hosted on Microsoft Azure, the solution complies with HIPAA, HITECH, SOC 1/2/3, and ISO 27001.
• Azure Active Directory and role-based access controls ensure secure identity management and data segmentation.
• The components interact through secure APIs, HL7/FHIR integrations, and Microsoft's native cloud services.
• Data is encrypted at rest and in transit.

Results, Expected Outcomes, and Future Plans

Leveraging Microsoft's low-code tools, pre-built integrations, and cloud-native scalability, core workflows were transitioned within four months of project initiation, accomplishing in that time what the Client had unsuccessfully attempted over two years on the previous platform. The fully-fledged solution is planned for delivery in eight months, with partner EHR and portal integrations to follow.

The Client expects the following results after the implementation of the HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform:

• Higher operational efficiency thanks to the transition from disconnected services to a single, scalable platform built on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
• Up to 40% reduction in manual coordination time for scheduling and care management through extensive workflow automation with Power Apps and Power Automate.
• Improved data accessibility and integrity via a centralized data repository enabled by Microsoft Dataverse and Azure, facilitating faster clinical decision-making and reducing risks of compliance violations.
• Optimized operations, shorter service delivery times, and lowered associated costs thanks to real-time visualization and KPI tracking delivered via Microsoft Power BI.

As a result, the client’s IT leadership expects to gain a scalable, future-proof platform that strengthens their position as an innovation leader in behavioral health.

The project is currently in the active development phase. Among the planned upcoming enhancements are full workflow automation, AI-powered document generation, and AI-driven workload balancing.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate), Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Power BI.