Adopt and Embrace is a Microsoft partner with 13 team members across Australia and New Zealand that works with organizations to improve how teams work together and create more inclusive modern workplaces using Microsoft 365. Adopt and Embrace helps customers across a number of industries including healthcare, education, government, and retail.

Adopt and Embrace firmly believes in the shared value and purpose-driven model of doing business, to the extent that in 2017, they undertook the intensive assessment required to certify as a B corporation. The company is focused on reducing its environmental impact, using Microsoft Teams video to avoid air travel whenever possible. Adopt and Embrace is also committed to giving back to the community, as 1 percent of its annual revenue is donated to youth mental health charity, Batyr.

Providing critical services to Australia’s disabled population

Currently, there are 4.3 million Australians with a disability—accounting for approximately 17 percent of the overall population. Recently, the Australian Government launched the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to provide necessary funding and services to support those suffering from permanent and significant disability—a group that makes up about 10 percent of those 4.3 million people.

KEO Physio Group is a specialist physio and occupational therapy provider that deliver services to those with permanent or significant disabilities as well as older patients in need of care. Experiencing a significant spike in demand following the launch of NDIS, KEO Physio Group knew that they had an opportunity to grow their business while expanding their impact on the lives of thousands of people in need of care.

A need for new infrastructure

KEO Physio Group knew that it would need to improve its technology infrastructure to keep up with its anticipated growth. KEO Physio Group’s employees had collaborated primarily via a combination of email (which had not been hosted on Office 365) and face-to-face meetings. The business had been driven by paper-based processes which often necessitated duplicate efforts to copy data into spreadsheets.

Employee computers were Apple Macs purchased from the local electronics store and it wasn’t unusual for the team to email attachments back and forth with as many as 10 rounds of revisions.

In addition, much of the team operated remotely or onsite with clients, resulting in them not visiting the head office for days or weeks at a time. This could result in delays lodging important paperwork, unnecessary administrative overheard, and difficulty tracking patient requests.

Given the work KEO Physio Group does within the community, delays like these could have an impact on some of the most vulnerable people in the area. As an example, one client needed to wait three extra months for a wheelchair because of a simple missed email by a bureaucrat.

Building a better workplace to change lives

Adopt and Embrace worked with KEO Physio Group to help envision the type of workplace they wanted to create as they moved to the future. The two organizations then worked to implement Microsoft 365 in order to make that vision a reality.

Adopt and Embrace helped KEO Physio Group migrate from their externally hosted email, local file storage, and Apple infrastructure while facilitating a shift from paper-based processes—moving KEO Physio Group to Microsoft 365 and equipping their employees with Surface Go devices. Adopt and Embrace also set up SharePoint Online to help KEO Physio Group store and edit important core documents and coached them on how to use Teams as their new collaboration hub.

Realizing immediate results

Client management has improved ten-fold following the implementation while enabling KEO Physio Group to grow rapidly to keep pace with new opportunities. The shift from paper-based processes has resulted in increased visibility across the team and has allowed the team to build more structured processes. Teams ensures that regardless of where KEO Physio Group’s team is working, critical conversations don’t get dropped, accelerating the deployment and coordination of critical resources and equipment that are needed to care for their aged and disabled clients—ensuring the vulnerable people KEO Physio Group serve can get the care they need when they need it.

What’s more, in an industry where the average turnover time for a physiotherapist is just two years, the flexibility and collaboration enabled by the solution should help KEO Physio Group to buck that trend.

Adopt and Embrace is already beginning the next phase of KEO Physio Group’s transformation—the roll out of Dynamics 365 Field Service. Until now, the scheduling of home visits has been a manual process for KEO Physio Group, using excel spreadsheets to keep track of appointments, invoicing, and billing information. Using Dynamics 365 Field Service, the team hopes to build significant efficiencies in these areas in order to reduce the commute times for their teams, streamline administration and billing, while ensuring the team has the right infrastructure in place to grow over the next 3–5 years.