The Lookout Way is a digital care management platform that enhances daily operations for Australian home care providers, allowing their teams to provide the highest quality client care.
Lookout distinguishes itself as a cloud based, all-in-one software that supports all the critical functions of a home care business – care management, rostering logistics, financial operations, clinical governance and customer service – all while retaining a clear focus on the experience of clients and their loved ones.
This article dives into how The Lookout Way partnered with Workato, an enterprise orchestration leader, to take their platform’s customisability and interoperability to a whole new level, and further empower their network of developers and clients.
The quest for efficient automation
Matthew Cowley, Head of Sales and Marketing at The Lookout Way, saw that the foundational elements of their platform API were ripe for automation, so as to minimize repetitive, low value tasks for users and support tailored experiences that allow Lookout care businesses to express their unique differences.
The Lookout Way’s initial approach to automation and integration, relying on first-party connections, proved to be limited and inflexible. For instance, considerable manual effort was involved in setting up individual automations – all the way from taking care of security keys to making sure the systems are configured correctly and tested.
The Lookout Way’s engineers and developers needed to regularly and manually read through their Application Programming Interface (API) documentation to understand the different endpoints that are available, and test and pull information back and forth from those endpoints.
Such manual heavy lifting was particularly problematic given that no two automations were truly the same. “80% of most integrations are the same, but it’s the final 20% that is different and it’s in the last part that you usually find the business’s unique operating model or consumer proposition expressing itself “ said Matthew. “It felt wrong to ask our customers to give up on the special processes that make them unique!”
The search for a fast and flexible solution
The Lookout Way needed an integration platform that could not only handle the commonalities across care operations but also adapt to the unique aspects of their clients’ business operations. This included automations that notify call centre teams to respond to a request, those that notify about canceled visits, as well as those that ensure compliance with specific service level agreements in the business, such as a 12 or 24 hour return call policy.
Matthew and his team even envisioned using pieces of their data model, ticketing and processing systems to fire alerts or draw particular actions in the system back to the right staffer at the right time so that they can focus on what’s important. They sought a solution that was fast, flexible, and capable of delivering repeatable automations tailored to their specific needs.
Implementing Workato’s best-in-class connectors
To address these challenges, The Lookout Way implemented Workato’s low-code integration and automation platform as a middleware system for all their automations – they call this embedded capability, “Lookout Automations” and it comes embedded, configured and securely set up within every Lookout instance, eliminating the manual setup work that was involved previously. This partnership unlocked thousands of integration and automation opportunities, allowing The Lookout Way to make logical adjustments between their API and the systems they wanted to integrate with.
Ricardo Bernardeli, Engineering Manager, praised the implementation as “best in class”, saying, “The connector reads our API docs automatically and builds the calls on top of that. Any new API endpoints are automatically available at Workato, something that I rarely see any other connectors doing.”
“Putting in the groundwork has paid off for The Lookout Way, as Lookout Automations has unlocked countless custom solutions for clients whilst reducing the workload on the engineering team. It’s impressive and it actually makes our clients smile when they see how powerful the connector is in comparison with any other connector.”
–Ricardo Bernardeli, Engineering Manager
“Workato allows us to solve a whole bunch of bespoke problems for our customers without having to spin up new projects or build it into Lookout.”
-Mathew Button, Software Engineer
Transforming operations and empowering developers
The use of Workato to orchestrate The Lookout Way’s platform has had a profound impact:
- Efficient, streamlined integrations: Lookout Automations comes embedded, configured and securely set up within every Lookout instance, eliminating the manual setup work that was involved previously.
- Empowered DIY approach: With Workato, The Lookout Way is able to better support a do-it-yourself strategy for businesses that want to build on top of their API. For instance, Workato puts a human-readable layer on top of Lookout’s API connection, which manages all security keys and all of the code required for those requests.
- Immediate API endpoint availability: New API endpoints are made available instantly, ensuring up-to-date integration capabilities.
“As the aged care industry undergoes significant change, it is critical to be seen as a platform that is both flexible and interoperable. Workato gives us a huge amount of credibility in the integration space.”
–Tate Johnson, CTO
“Thanks to our partnership with Workato, Lookout is positioned as a platform that the care industry can innovate on at scale.”
-Matthew Cowley, Head of Demand and Revenue
New horizons for the future of care
The Lookout Way’s journey with Workato is far from over. They are committed to continuously building new recipes and improving their automation capabilities.
As Matthew Cowley states, “Our team is constantly working on building new recipes. Lookout users can quickly benefit and share or reuse the work that they’ve done in automations across multiple instances. We’re thrilled to see the creativity embedded Workato has unleashed in our client base. We’re excited to set up future events that will allow them to showcase their work and collaborate with each other and us on care industry innovation.”
The Lookout Way’s partnership with Workato has not only streamlined their automation and integration processes but has also set the stage for a future where their clients gain the ultimate flexibility of customising the platform to their unique business preferences and needs.
“We find that many care businesses have so many unique requirements that they go out and build their own, extremely expensive custom system. Even when they do, those custom systems often fall short due to the intricate complexities of home care. Now that Workato’s capabilities are available within Lookout, home care providers get the reliability of Lookout’s all-in-one, easy-to-use, by care, for care, solution, but can also customise it to all their unique and varied business needs. This can save them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
-Matthew Cowley, Head of Demand and Revenue
