COVID-19 Automated Response Toolkit
A rapid, no-budget, no-code response that screened and protected a 350-staff mental-health agency in a week — then was given to the sector.
The challenge
In the first weeks of the pandemic, the Canadian Mental Health Association's Toronto branch had to protect roughly 350 staff across 13 sites — and the thousands of vulnerable clients they serve — almost overnight. Everyone coming near a client or a site had to be screened, exposure had to be tracked across the whole organisation, suddenly-scarce protective equipment had to be managed, and leadership needed real-time visibility.
All of it had to happen remotely, with no budget, no development team, and no time. The toolkit below was built in a week, by the agency's Director of Finance & Corporate Services, on the Microsoft 365 licences the agency already held.
What was built
Automated screeners
Branching Microsoft Forms screeners — client, staff, and contractor versions — aligned to the Ontario Ministry of Health self-assessment, with consent captured first.
Real-time result routing
On submit, Power Automate applied the rules and emailed the result instantly, role-based — a positive screen reached the worker and the nursing lead at once.
Exposure monitoring
An agency-wide tracker of clients in isolation, suspected, confirmed, or resolved, with de-identified, role-based visibility so leadership saw only what they needed.
PPE inventory & orders
Structured daily counts and order tracking across sites — locked cells, dropdowns, and standard units turned messy entry into clean, reportable data.
Power BI dashboards
Interactive inventory and exposure dashboards the directors reviewed each morning, with a panel that flagged which site's data was still incomplete.
A shared hub
A Teams and SharePoint hub holding every tool and instruction, opened to partner organisations as guests with source files and training.
The connector that made it work
Power Automate was the connector that tied the whole thing together. It sat quietly in the background — reading each form submission, applying the rules, and routing the result to the right people — with no new data stores and no new infrastructure. Everything ran on the storage, accounts, and licences the agency already held.
Microsoft Forms — the screeners
The front end. Branching Forms where an answer triggers the next question, consent is captured first, and a refusal ends the screen. Separate client, staff, and contractor versions kept the logic near-identical while the cadence differed by role, location, and risk.
1a — the client screener opens with consent and a plain-language privacy notice.
1 / 3Power Automate → Outlook — real-time result emails
On submit, Power Automate applied the rules and sent the result automatically, with clear next steps, the triggering symptoms, who screened, and a timestamp. Routing was role-based: a positive screen reached the worker and the nursing or testing lead at once.
2a — a daily reminder pushed the current screener links and procedures to all staff.
1 / 4Excel on SharePoint — the trackers
The data store. Structured, locked, and validated sheets on SharePoint turned messy entry into reportable data — for exposure oversight and for the province-mandated PPE counts and orders, so sites could find and share scarce supply instead of competing for it.
3a — the client exposure tracker: status over time, for oversight alongside the clinical record, never instead of it.
1 / 3Power BI — the dashboards
The view from above. Interactive inventory and exposure dashboards — stock and on-order by location, cases by status and trend over time, with cross-filtering and drill-down. Around sixty managers, leads, and leadership had access, and the directors reviewed them each morning.
4a — the client-exposure dashboard: cases by status and trend, with a panel that flagged which site's data was still incomplete.
1 / 2The stack — and why Microsoft
Everything ran on Microsoft 365: Forms as the front end, SharePoint as the data store, Power Automate for the logic and routing, Outlook for the real-time result emails, Power BI for the dashboards, and Teams for collaboration. End users needed only an internet connection and an email account — nothing to install.
Microsoft was the practical choice. At the time, most non-profits received donated Microsoft licensing, and Google's tools weren't yet capable enough for this kind of work. The landscape is more varied now, but in 2020 Microsoft 365 was typical for any organisation with the scale to run a project like this — and this is exactly where it paid off: multiple sites, clear escalation pathways, and in-house nursing and testing capacity as a bonus.
The build was signed off by legal counsel and the privacy officer to PHIPA standards, with multi-factor authentication and security hardening added to the tenant.
Built by a non-programmer — fast, and free
The whole toolkit was built in a week by a CPA with no programming background, using spreadsheet-level logic and a lot of YouTube. It ran on licences the agency already held, at effectively no incremental cost.
It was then packaged with its source files and training videos and given to more than two hundred peer non-profits, so they did not have to build it from scratch in the middle of a crisis.
The throughlines
Meet people where they are
Familiar Forms and email; end users installed nothing.
Structure messy data
Locked cells, dropdowns, and standard units turn entry into reportable data.
De-identify, least privilege
Role-based visibility — leadership and dashboards see only what they need.
Human in the loop
Automation routes and notifies; people own the clinical record and the decisions.
Real-time automation
Instant, automatic result emails and role-based routing.
Built to share
Packaged with source files and training for the wider sector.
This was built more than six years ago, in a week, at no cost. Both the tools and our own technical skills have come a long way since — but the throughlines are exactly the ones we still build on: familiar front-ends, structured data, de-identification, role-based access, and human-in-the-loop automation.
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