Inside our session with Microsoft, Austin Health and RACS on secure forms, case management and where AI actually saves clinicians time.
š 30 July 2026Ā Ā ā° 54-minute sessionĀ Ā š Microsoft + The Factor
Couldn’t make it live, or want to share it with your team?
Every hour a clinician spends on paperwork is an hour they don’t spend with a patient. That was the starting point for our latest webinar,Ā Returning Clinicians to Care: Secure Forms & Case Management, hosted with Microsoft and featuring real stories from Austin Health and the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS).
We opened with an Acknowledgement of Country, then got straight into it: how do we give time back to the people doing the actual work of care, and what does that look like once it’s out of a slide deck and into a hospital ward or a national training program?
The problem isn’t new, but the pressure is building
Megan Lloyd, Microsoft’s Healthcare Industry Advisor, framed the challenge plainly: Australia has a world-class health system that’s running into workforce capacity, fragmented data, and inconsistent governance across states. By 2030 we’re facing a shortfall of more than 120,000 nurses, and clinicians are carrying the weight of it in admin. Patients move between GP, hospital and aged care through systems that were never built to talk to each other.
None of that is a surprise to anyone working in the sector. The session’s real value was in what comes next: three concrete examples of teams closing that gap.
A morning in the life of a nurse unit manager, with Copilot doing the admin
Joel Collings walked through a scenario built around “Nellie,” a nurse unit manager starting her Monday. Instead of piecing together emails, rosters and overnight incident reports by hand, Nellie asks Microsoft 365 Copilot and Cowork to act as her ward’s digital chief of staff: pull the weekend’s messages and calendar, flag any nurse-to-patient ratio risks in the roster, summarise overnight incidents, and check who’s overdue for mandatory training. It hands back a one-page brief in minutes.
From there, the demo went further than a status report. Nellie asked Copilot to calculate minimum safe staffing against the roster and flag ratio compliance shift by shift, then work out the dollar cost of each shift, including penalty rates and skill mix. A follow-up to Copilot’s analyst agent turned two weeks of rostering data into a diagnosis: which shifts breached safe staffing, where agency spend was highest, and three concrete actions to fix it. With time still up her sleeve, Nellie asked Copilot to design a clean, on-brand ISBAR handover poster for the ward ā describing the look she wanted in plain language rather than opening a design tool.
- A start-of-week brief pulled automatically from emails, Teams and the roster
- Ratio compliance and shift-cost analysis without an Excel power user in the room
- Two weeks of roster data turned into patterns, charts and prioritised actions
- A polished, on-brand safety poster designed in minutes, no graphic designer required
The point wasn’t the technology for its own sake. It was that Nellie walked into her morning huddle prepared, and with enough time back to actually lead her team rather than just survive the shift.
Austin Health: turning patient reported outcomes into a statewide system
Liz Walkley, Research Nurse Lead for Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) at Austin Health, shared how her team moved away from measuring surgical success purely on clinical signs like X-rays, toward capturing the patient’s own perspective on pain, mobility and quality of life.
The team started on REDCap, manually entering surgery dates from Austin’s patient administration system to trigger PROM surveys at set intervals. It worked, but it was labour-intensive and sat in a silo, disconnected from the rest of the hospital’s systems. Partnering with Microsoft and The Factor changed that: the digital health questionnaire, built on the Power Platform, now connects directly with Austin’s patient administration system and encodes validated instruments like the EQ-5D correctly on the back end, so the clinical scoring holds up.
The result is a single patient portal experience, pre- and post-surgery questionnaires that fire automatically, and Power BI dashboards that surgeons and physios can pull up in clinic to talk through a patient’s trajectory in real time. Liz’s team has already tracked outcomes across hundreds of patients and can show new patients real, comparable data on what recovery looks like for people like them.
RACS: from three disconnected systems to one end-to-end process
Andreas Diamanti, senior technology leader at RACS, spoke to a different kind of admin burden: thousands of international surgeons applying each year for surgical training and accreditation in Australia, working through PDF forms, a legacy K2 system, and a range of spreadsheets just to get through triage.
Working with The Factor, RACS mapped its current and future state and consolidated three disparate systems and their associated PDFs into one Dynamics 365 solution, using Form Factor to model the existing PDF forms directly rather than rebuilding every field and attribute from scratch. The impact was measurable: roughlyĀ 47 daysĀ of effort saved, including 16 days previously lost simply navigating between systems, plus faster supervision, review and applicant notifications.
For Andreas, the outcome went beyond the time saved. It’s now the standard approach his team plans to use on future projects, because building screens by absorbing an existing PDF was simply faster than building them attribute by attribute in Dynamics.
The platform underneath: turning a PDF into a live workflow in minutes
Luke Kelly, Senior Product Manager for Form Factor, closed out the demonstrations by showing how both stories come together on one platform, deployed entirely within a customer’s own Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 environment.
Using a real pre-admission health questionnaire PDF as the example, Luke uploaded it into Form Factor’s AI form builder, added a short instruction to drop the “office use only” sections, and let the tool read the document, identify fields, sections and rules, and draft a modern digital form automatically. What would previously take a developer hours of manual, attribute-by-attribute setup was ready to review and publish in five to ten minutes, complete with logic such as hiding fields when a patient doesn’t require an interpreter.
He then showed the other side of that same workflow: a QR-code feedback form built the same way, submitted by a “patient,” and immediately visible in Dynamics 365 as a case ā complete with a full audit trail, communication history and status tracking through to resolution. One platform, from paper form to published portal to managed case, without switching tools.
Where to start, without a big upfront commitment
Damien Neale closed the session with a practical next step. You don’t need a large investment to start modernising a workflow like this. For eligible healthcare organisations, Microsoft funding is available to build and validate a solution in your own environment first, before any broader investment decision.
The Factor and Microsoft are offering a complementary two-to-three-hour workshop to identify priority workflows, assess governance and data readiness, and agree on the best process to modernise as a proof of concept, the same funded pathway that got Austin Health and RACS started.
If there’s a process in your organisation, clinical or corporate, that’s causing friction for your team or the people you serve, that’s exactly the kind of conversation worth having.
Missed the live session?
Watch the full recording to see the Copilot walkthrough, both customer stories, and the Form Factor demo in full.
Want to talk about a workflow in your organisation? Reach out atĀ holla@thefactor.com.au
