CLINICAL REFERRAL PROCESS UPGRADE
Streamlining patient referrals from the ED through an email-based clinical referral system
PROJECT SUMMARY
Currently the TWH ED uses a fax-based system to send referrals to the various UHN clinics that serve the department. This system is no longer robust enough to ensure the privacy and accuracy that our patient’s medical information requires. On a daily basis, the ED deals with call-backs from both patients and clinics reporting incomplete or unsent faxes that require the time-consuming task of pulling charts and re-faxing them, sometimes several times depending on the quality of the receiving technology.
The goal of this project is to implement an email-based referral system for the internal clinics receiving the highest-volume of patient referrals from the ED. This requires the buy-in of the managers and clerical staff of these clinics as well as the establishment of unique, UHN-based secure email addresses for these clinics to receive the referrals. This project will also establish a generic template for ED-based referrals as well as a basic template for clinics to modify to suit their needs in retrieval and handling of referrals within the new email-based environment.
PROJECT LEADS
Giancarlo Irwin
Term of project: April 2014 – May 2016