New referral intake

The problem

Every referral is read once by whoever triages it, again by whoever prepares the clinic, and a third time by whoever sees the patient. The same information is typed into your system somewhere in the middle.

The steps

1. Input, taking the referral document.
2. Ask Rhazes to pull out the identifiers, the presenting problem, relevant history, current medication, and what is actually being asked of you. That last one matters: referrals often ask for something different from what the history suggests.
3. Ask, putting anything it could not find to you rather than guessing. A referral with no date of birth should stop and ask, not invent one. See Asking the clinician mid-run.
4. Create patient, so they are on your list with the referral summary already in the record. See Working with patients in a workflow.
5. Document, producing a pre-clinic summary in your format.
6. Create tasks for what has to happen before they are seen: the investigation to arrange, the old notes to request, the appointment to book.

Adding triage

If your service triages by urgency, add a Branch after step 2 routing on the criteria your service actually uses, taken from your protocol rather than from Rhazes. File different tasks with different due dates on each path, and send anything that matches no case down the else path for a human to look at.

See Branching on a condition.

Chaining it onward

Intake is a natural first link in a chain. Rather than making this one workflow also prepare the clinic, finish it with a Handoff to your pre-clinic preparation workflow.

Each stays independently useful, and the preparation workflow is maintained in one place rather than duplicated inside every workflow that needs it. See Chaining workflows together.

What to check

The identifiers, every time. A workflow that creates patients is a workflow that can create the wrong patient, which is exactly why step 3 asks instead of assuming. Confirm the record before working from it.

Also check for duplicates. If the patient is already on your list from a previous referral, you want to add to that record rather than create a second one.