E-Referral
Referrals between acute and post-acute facilities are essential to patient flow within the health care system. Current referral processes involve lengthy paper forms and time consuming faxing of the forms between organizations. This results in unnecessary delays due to incomplete applications, illegible writing, or the matching of patients to inappropriate programs.
A new project sponsored by the Toronto Central LHIN aims to improve workflow and communication during the referral process between acute surgical and medical inpatient units, rehab/complex continuing care (CCC) facilities and the Toronto Central Community Care Access Centre (TC CCAC). The online system of the Toronto Central LHIN Resource and Referral Management Project is the next generation of the referral process: the system permits clinicians to simultaneously access the referral form online from any hospital computer, matches the right patient to the right program at the right time, and when complete, ensures the secure submission of the rehab/CCC or CCAC application at the click of a button.
CICC and Shared Information Management Services (SIMS) are working together to evaluate the system and its tangible benefits.