How St. Michael's Hospital centralized requests and scheduling for its 100-member anesthesia group

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The Problem

SMH’s anesthesia group is one of the hospital's most operationally complex departments: 100+ members across seven role types, each with different operational needs. For years, that complexity was held together by one person.

Dr. Nick Lo, Deputy Chief of Anesthesia, managed most of the group's internal processes himself, using a mix of email and disconnected Airtable bases. Whether a staff anesthesiologist needed to submit a request, a resident needed a weekly operating room schedule, or the pharmacy needed to log an incident, it landed in his inbox.

Some of these workflows had basic Make automations attached, but each one was a standalone connection with no coherent system behind it. Communications went out from a personal email address with no branding or audit trail, and members replied directly to emails instead of taking action in a system. 

Dr. Lo needed a secure platform that could:

• Provide a single access point for all member-facing workflows (requests, schedules, and more)
• Support strict role-based access for 7+ distinct user types
• Automate communications that direct users back into the portal (rather than into reply-all email chains)
• Allow custom components without it being a fully custom build

The Solution

Dr. Lo worked with Softr partner Sahil Khosla of Brysk Solutions to build an internal portal serving SMH’s staff anesthesiologists, anesthesia associates, residents, fellows, pharmacy and peri-operative  partners, and admins. 

Each group sees a tailored dashboard when they log in, with relevant modules, data, and permissions (view-only, submit, or manage). The portal consolidates the anesthesia group's day-to-day operations into a single experience:

• Requests, evaluations, and incidents tracking: Three structured workflows replaced the old email-and-spreadsheet patchwork. Staff submit and track internal requests, log structured peer evaluations, and report pharmacy and drug-related incidents directly in the portal.
• Weekly operating room schedule management: OR schedules are generated as PDFs via Documint and distributed automatically to the relevant members each week.
• AI-powered knowledge base: A Pinecone-backed vector search delivers RAG-based answers from training and compliance docs natively in the portal, built using Softr's Vibe Coding Block. 
• Internal polls and forms: Form embeds capture structured input for surveys and group polls.
• Role-aware communications: Branded transactional and broadcast emails go out via Brevo, SMS via Simply Text, and admin alerts via Slack. Every notification links back to a specific page in the portal, ending the email reply-chain pattern.

Sahil use Softr’s standard blocks for most of the build, but pieces like the AI knowledge base needed more flexibility. Custom vibe-coded components let him embed those features natively in the portal, so the end product feels cohesive (and not like a patchwork of third-party widgets).

The Impact

The SMH Member Portal now serves all 100+ active members across the anesthesia group, with room to scale well beyond that. Workflows that used to run out of Dr. Lo’s inbox are now centralized in a single system, making them easy to track and manage. Communications go out automatically, and members are directed back to the portal to take action.

“Coordinating more than 100 members across several role types used to mean dozens of parallel email threads, with no continuity if I was unavailable,” said Dr. Lo. “Members now submit requests, access schedules, and report incidents directly, and I can track status without manual follow-up. The result is a more reliable operation supported by a system rather than a single individual.”

Another win is what the platform enables for the future: with a clean data architecture across Airtable and Xano and a custom frontend through Softr, SMH can extend the portal with new AI features, additional modules, and deeper integrations, without rebuilding the foundation.
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