When you want to set up a new service in Tuku so that this service can receive referrals electronically, you will need to think about the following.
- What name do you want to assign to the service so that it will be easily recognised by the referrer?
- Is the service available nationally, or only to patients who live in a particular district?
- What workflow would work best for the service provider?
- Is there any particular "help text" you would like to display to the referrer?
- Does the service provider want to be notified every time a new referral is submitted?
- What information does the service provider require?
- How will the referral be created?
Service Name
You will want to name the service something meaningful to the referrer so that it is easily recognised.
Restricting the service to specific districts
When you set up the service in Tuku, you can specify that the service is only to be offered to patients who live within a particular DHB. By default, a service will be availble to patients who live in any DHB. (If the way the referral is created is already DHB-specific, then you may not need this level of complexity).
What workflow works best for the service provider?
As a minimum, you will probably want referrals to have the following statuses available:
- New Referral (the status that will be assigned when the referral will be created)
- Referral Accepted (to allow the service provider to confirm that the referral has been received and will be actioned)
- Referral Rejected (to allow the service provider to indicate that they are unable to action the referral e.g. where the person is not eligible for the service)
- Referral Completed (to allow the service provider to indicate that a referral has been actioned).
But you can have as many different statuses as you want, depending on how the service provider wants to use Tuku. For example, you could also have:
- Appointment Made
- Patient Contacted
- Referral Declined by Patient
- Patient Assessed
Help Text
You can define "help text" for each service that may be displayed to the referrer when this service is selected (depending on how referrals are created). This could be used to define the eligibility criteria or any other information that needs to be conveyed to the referrer.
Notification
You can associated an email address (or even multiple email addresses) with a service so that whenever a new referral is created, an email is sent advising them of the new referral. This is helpful when referrals are submitted only occasionally, but will probably be annoying if many referrals are submitted every day.
Information required
What information does the referrer need when a referral is submitted other than the patient's demographic details and contact details, which are always provided on every referral?
There are many "standard" fields that can be included. If they have a requirement that cannot be met through the "standard" fields, then a small amount of development may be required to provide the additional information.
For example, standard fields that are available (there are many - this is just a small subset) include:
- height and weight
- Covid vaccine status
- various blood test results
- long term medications
- current problem list.
A full list of all current "standard" fields that can be included within a referral is available from Procon.
How will the referral be created?
There are a variety of tools currently in use that can created referrals and they all have slightly different ways that the referrals are integrated. For example, referrals can be created directly from:
- Patient Dashboard (e.g. for alcohol services when recording alcohol consumption)
- Best Start Pregnancy
- Best Start Pēpi
- SUDI risk assessment
- an e-referral form within a GP's practice management system.
How the referral is going to be generated needs to be known by Procon to ensure that the service is configured correctly.
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