Enhancement updates provide short alerts to new, fixed or improved Connect Care functions...
- Significant Improvements to Referrals
The Connect Care Referrals Taskforce has been working over the last several months to make improvements to referrals for both senders and receivers. In 2023, over 1.12 million referrals were ordered and transcribed into Connect Care; higher than expected rates of decline and missing information in the referrals resulted in delayed access to specialty care. Several items have been identified as contributing to poor quality referrals, and therefore, as of July 23, 2024 (between 12:00 and 13:00), a number of changes will be seen in referral orders, including the following.
- The Reference Links section has been organized to ensure only applicable links to referral criteria are listed.
- When a Resident is ordering a referral, they will see a new hard stop question that will require them to indicate who the referring provider is (click on camera icon to see screenshot). The answer will then auto-populate the "Referral - By Provider" field upon signing, if it had not already been filled out.
- A "Scheduling Instructions" section has been made visible and should be used by prescribers to communicate to clerical staff where they would like an outgoing referral sent. Staff processing referrals will be able to find these scheduling instructions in a new column in the Referral Workqueues and in the Workqueue summary report.
- Quality Referral Evolution (QuRE) content in the form of specific questions have been incorporated.
- Ambulatory referral orders for Neurology, Gastroenterology, and Colon Cancer Screening will be updated with various changes including custom specialty reference links, optimized speed buttons, and cascading questions specific to specialty criteria, to ensure the referral orders include required information for effective and efficient triaging. Users may be required to re-personalize preference lists and order/Smart sets containing previous versions of the ambulatory referral orders, to ensure the updated version is used.