Staying Healthy with Flow and PowerApps

Getting sick is never fun, especially with small kids at home.  This is why it’s important that we take

our meds quickly to avoid prolonging our recovery.  In the past, I would stack up each on some common meds to be ready just in case I needed them.  However, I would still find myself either missing some, buying the same ones I already have, or having expired ones because I bought too many in the past.  Well, now that I have Flow and PowerApps, that is all in the past.

In this post, I’m describing a simple MedApp I built to help me keep track of the meds I have at home and replenish any that are about to expire.  The app serves a few purposes:

• Keeps track of what apps I have at home and when they expire
• Notify me when meds are about to expire

The solution is made up of three parts:  SharePoint list, Flow, and PowerApp

SharePoint List

The SharePoint list is the backend that stores all my key information.  A few fields were required for this solution:

Field Name	Description	Type
Title	Name of medication	Single line of text
Description	Description of medication	Multiple lines of text (plain text)
Expiry Date	When the meds expire	Date

Of course, you can track additional information about each drug if you choose to.

Flow

The solution has a time-triggered Flow that checks on a nightly basis if there are any meds that are about to expire (within two weeks) and sends a notification via email.  There are three actions and one control required to build this flow.

1. Get a list of all items who's due date is within 15 days.  To do so, I'm leveraging the following Flow expression in the Get items action under the Filter Query field  formatdatetime(adddays(utcnow(),15),'yyyy-MM-dd')
   
   
2. Create an HTML table for all the items using the Create HTML table action.  I only need the Title and Expire Date (Expiry_x0020_Date) for my email
    
   
3. Finally, I use the Send email action to notify me of the medications that are about to expire

The flow can easily be expanded to add items to a shopping list for other apps and services, such as Amazon.  In that case, you will likely need to add additional fields to the SharePoint list to add the item ID or links for these medications in the various apps or services.

PowerApp

To keep things simple, I'm using the Start from data template and modified a few fields to achieve the look shown above

In particular, in order to get the EXPIRED label to show up, I'm using the following formula for the Visible parameter:  DateDiff(Today(),ThisItem.'Expiry Date',Days)<0

Similarly, I'm using the expiry date to determine whether the bar on the left-hand-side of an item should be white (default), yellow (within 30 to 15 days of expiry), or red (less than 15 days of expiry).

If(DateDiff(Today(),ThisItem.'Expiry Date',Days)<15,RGBA(255,0,0,1),If(And(DateDiff(Today(),ThisItem.'Expiry Date',Days)>=15,DateDiff(Today(),ThisItem.'Expiry Date',Days)<30),RGBA(255,255,0,1),RGBA(255,255,255,1)))

Simple solution, but will hopefully help you stay healthy by having your meds nearby and prevent you from wasting money on buying too much.