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Case Study: Dental Health Services Victoria


How Victoria’s leading public oral health agency implemented an online form solution to streamline the provision of clinical dental services across nearly 90 sites across the state.

  • Every week, Dental Health Services Victoria (DHSV) processes 5,000 to 8,000 form submissions received from patients and users of their services
  • DHSV needed an Australian-based online forms provider with a full-featured platform that integrated seamlessly with Microsoft Power Automate
  • The scalability of the Snapforms platform has been instrumental in helping DHSV to create significant efficiencies across its data collection processes

As Victoria’s leading public oral health agency, Dental Health Services Victoria (DHSV) provides clinical dental services across nearly 90 sites across the state.

In Melbourne, these services are provided through The Royal Dental Hospital of Melbourne (RDHM), with regional Victorians serviced using a network of more than 50 community health agencies.

In any given week, the DHSV team must process around 5,000 to 8,000 form submissions received from patients and users of their services – including medical history questionnaires, patient registration forms, consent forms, and forms related to their Smile Squad program – a Victorian Government program that provides free dental care to all Victorian government primary and secondary school students.

What was the business challenge?

Nuno Goncalves, DHSV’s Chief Information Officer, recognised DHSV’s need to digitise the collection and processing of all the data pouring into the organisation’s systems each week.

It was important for us to find a local provider.

“We needed the means to get correspondence from outpatients – which was traditionally done using paper forms that we would send out to patients to complete before attending the service,” Nuno explains.

“We wanted something that we were able to not only digitise but were able to then have integration into some sort of capability that our developers would then be able to pick up and integrate with our clinical management system.

“We searched everywhere for suitable solutions – most of them tended to be overseas-based which is quite challenging for us given that we operate in the health care sector and a lot of the information we would be pulling would be patient health information.

“It took us a while to come across Snapforms – we were trialling another vendor but they were based overseas and were trying to build an onshore cloud presence for us but it became too complex and messy, so we went back to the drawing board.

“It was important for us to find a local provider.”

How was the solution implemented?

Despite the initial setbacks in their search for an Australian-based online form provider, once they found Snapforms, Nuno said the implementation process proceeded quickly.

One of the primary requirements was to have integration into Microsoft Power Automate.

“We came across Snapforms and had a series of conversations with them in regard to what we were aiming to do.

“The original project was around a medical history questionnaire. We discussed a proof-of-concept around the integration capability where we would then be able to validate our own ability to integrate into our clinical management system.

“One of the primary requirements was to have integration into Microsoft Power Automate because we do a lot of our integrations with our systems within Power Automate.”

After successfully integrating their first Snapforms form with Power Automate, Nuno’s team quickly migrated their other forms into the Snapforms platform.

“The key point for us in buying a platform that was the front-end patient or customer-facing component was that it had that one integration capability which allowed us to do what we needed to do,” says Nuno.

A fully integrated online form solution

Given the diversity of DHSV’s client base, with patients from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and ethnicities, Nuno’s team has found Snapforms’ broad feature set and flexibility tremendously useful.

The rendering capability across multiple platforms is done seamlessly.

For example, Snapform’s multi-lingual and translation capabilities have assisted patients from non-English speaking backgrounds to access DHSV’s services.

Nuno also rates highly Snapforms’ mobile-friendly responsive user interfaces and the seamless transition between the various integrated platforms used by his team.

“The rendering capability across multiple platforms is done seamlessly,” he explains.

Having fully responsive forms also means DHSV’s patients can use their own devices to access and fill in forms on arrival in the waiting room, and DHSV can automatically integrate this data within their network of systems in real-time without having to invest in additional hardware such as tablets or touchscreens at every site.

It lets us maintain our individual or organisational identity in the process.

The ability to easily customise every online form so that each one aligns with DHSV’s brand is also an important attribute according to Nuno.

“Being able to put our branding and custom colouring, along with the structured layout, helps us to be consistent in the look and feel of the various forms, which is good, otherwise you can end up with a proliferation of different styles” Nuno explains.

“It lets us maintain our individual or organisational identity in the process.”

A scalable platform that updates dynamically

Given the size and distribution of DHSV’s operations, Nuno recognised the scalability of the Snapforms platform as being instrumental in helping the organisation to create significant efficiencies across its data collection processes.

Transitioning to this platform has been a massive improvement.

“Because we look at it from the perspective of a large organisation, we recognised the amount of time and effort and lost productivity in managing paper forms.

“So for us, it [Snapforms] was a no-brainer – design it once and push it out and leverage that.

“And being able to update it dynamically and having that immediately reflected in the current circulated material – from an efficiency perspective, coming from an environment that was heavily dependent on paper to now transitioning to this platform has been a massive improvement on both the efficiency and resources required to actually manage the paper component.”

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