1. Evaluating Electronic Referrals for Specialty Care at a Public Hospital
- Author
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Kim-Hwang, Judy E., Chen, Alice Hm, Bell, Douglas S., Guzman, David, Yee, Hal F., and Kushel, Margot B.
- Subjects
Medicine & Public Health ,Internal Medicine ,access to care ,communication ,specialty care - Abstract
Poor communication between referring clinicians and specialists may lead to inefficient use of specialist services. San Francisco General Hospital implemented an electronic referral system (eReferral) that facilitates iterative pre-visit communication between referring and specialty clinicians to improve the referral process.The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of eReferral (compared with paper-based referrals) on specialty referrals.The study was based on a visit-based questionnaire appended to new patient charts at randomly selected specialist clinic sessions before and after the implementation of eReferral.Specialty clinicians.The questionnaire focused on the self-reported difficulty in identifying referral question, referral appropriateness, need for and avoidability of follow-up visits.We collected 505 questionnaires from speciality clinicians. It was difficult to identify the reason for referral in 19.8% of medical and 38.0% of surgical visits using paper-based methods vs. 11.0% and 9.5% of those using eReferral (p-value 0.03 and
- Published
- 2010