The Facility Registry team have recently had a conversation around referrals and the summery is listed here in the linked document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11z9nxLAWF9qrNRwJVNHRjRDWvsTN1mAU0NH8pg08d7g/edit#
On Aug 11, 2016 we had a FR call to discuss various aspects of patient referral services
The focus of the call was to discuss:
1) Existing referral projects
2) Typical barriers and issues
3) Needs
The purpose of this document is to summarize findings and provide recommendations for next steps
A full recording of the meeting is available here, uncondensed notes are available here
Referral systems serve to address serviceable gaps in the healthcare system by leveraging information about nearby health facilities and offered services to improve:
Access to the right health care services for patients
Efficiency of workload for health workers
Care planning and delivery of healthcare services
Quality of health facility capacity and case denials data
Loss to follow up
Reduced and more transparent waiting times
More patient choice
Improved quality of care and patient-provider relationship
Improve quality and security of referral data
Facilitation of information sharing
Evaluation of unsubstantiated denials?
Health workers/Medical Staff
Patients (local and external?)
Private Health Facility “Groups”/Local Integrated Health Networks (LHIN)?
Labs
Mental Health Facilities?
Provider to Provider - health care provider refers to another health care provider or specialist
Referral to Queue - provider places patient case in queue for care
Patient Self Referral/Lookup - patient looks at available services and self refers
Urgent Care - patient physically joins referral queue by visiting an emergency facility
Care Plan Referral - recurring service/test referral based on a care plan prescribed by health professionals
Referral Queue - Registry - Management Thingy
Facility Registry
Health Worker Registry
Electronic Medical Record
Available health services catalog (Location, Provider, Types of Services)
Patient identification and prioritization
Patient to resource matching (vacancy matching)
Inclusion of Medical Records
Where a local EMR is not developed, referrals can still leverage shared health records through other (traditional) communication channels
Reason for referral, level of urgency and triage of patient signs/symptoms
Referral advice requisition
Redundancies for denied service
Method for tracking Denials of Care
Data to analyze efficiency to inform resource allocation
RTI Indonesia -
Paper on Referral Exchange and why they avoided creating it as a standalone.https://www.rti.org/sites/default/files/resources/rr-0011-1003-darcy.pdf
Project Case Study -- link
Technical Report on project: link
USAID mHealth Compendium link (see vol 4)
RTI Zambia - link to ZEPRS Project
Canadian Dental Association - Impact Analysis Report
Alberta eReferral (Program Overview, User Guide, Link 3 [video])
Third Party Standards
Which Registries and Services could be involved: FR, HWR, SHR
Existing Standards
Jembi - Blood Testing and HIV Referrals
Facility Registry or Health Worker Registry Implementations (e.g., Tanzania)
Identify a tangible implementation context to ground the use case.