Allied health — governed M365 AI pilot
Multi-site allied health group, 45 staff · Healthcare & allied health
Clinicians and admin staff were pasting referral templates and policy excerpts into public ChatGPT — fast, but with no audit trail and no guarantee patient-adjacent content stayed inside the organisation. Leadership needed a governed AI pilot on operational documents, plus M365 controls, before expanding Copilot seats.
The problem
Intake forms, referral letters, and internal SOPs lived across SharePoint, email, and a practice management system that did not talk to M365. New hires asked the same policy questions in Teams. The privacy officer blocked a broad Copilot rollout until permissions and data boundaries were mapped. Meanwhile, referral follow-ups and appointment reminders still ran on manual spreadsheets.
Constraints
- — Clinical records out of scope for pilot — operational and policy docs only
- — Privacy officer sign-off required before any AI goes live
- — Pilot cohort live in four weeks across three clinic sites
- — Must work with existing practice management — no rip and replace
Approach
Step 1
Readiness & data boundaries
Mapped SharePoint libraries, sensitivity labels, and Entra groups to clinical vs admin boundaries. Ran an FC-19-style permissions review — overshared folders remediated before any model touched content.
Step 2
Governed assistant on approved libraries
Built an Azure OpenAI assistant with hybrid retrieval on onboarding packs, referral templates, and operational SOPs. Answers cite source documents; access mirrors Entra group membership.
Step 3
Intake & reminder automation
Power Automate flows for referral intake routing, appointment reminder sequences, and weekly admin reporting — with Teams alerts when a step fails.
Step 4
Pilot rollout & governance
Shipped Teams app to admin and clinical support cohort. Documented data boundaries, change process, and expansion criteria for board review.
Deliverables
- M365 permissions baseline — MFA, conditional access, SharePoint hygiene
- Azure OpenAI assistant with Entra RBAC and source citations
- Teams pilot app for admin and clinical support staff
- Power Automate intake and reminder workflows
- Governance pack for privacy officer and internal IT
Results
- Shadow AI
- Pilot cohort moved off public ChatGPT for approved operational docs
- Admin time
- Estimated 6–8 hrs/week saved on referral chasing and reminders
- Permissions
- Clinical libraries never surfaced to admin-only Entra groups
- Stack
- Azure OpenAI · AI Search · Entra ID · SharePoint · Power Automate · Teams
“We finally have AI that respects who can see what — and our privacy officer could actually sign it off.”
Facing something similar?
Similar outcome: Enterprise SOP Assistant Pilot — $9,500–$12,500 · 3–4 weeks.