Electronic Referral Management

Disclaimer
The information contained on this page is intended for primary health practitioners and other referrers who engage with the Northern NSW Local Health District.  No part of this content may be reproduced by any third party for any use, including in the media or other websites, without express written permission of NNSWLHD Media Unit.

Please contact the NNSWLHD Media Unit at nnswlhd-media@health.nsw.gov.au.

Engage Outpatients Program

Electronic Referral Management System

NNSWLHD is piloting an electronic Referrral Management System (“eRMS”) which has been designed and built in collaboration with eHealth NSW, the Ministry of Health and representatives from across the state.

  • It will be introduced to all services already using the existing pilot RMS (read more here) in a staged manner.
  • It will consume all external (e.g. GP referrals) referrals – fax, eReferral, phone, paper, self-referral – in one place.
  • The project will also introduce a standard faxed referral coversheet across the district, and external referrers (e.g. GPs) asked to use the coversheet in front of all faxed referrals to NNSWLHD Outpatient and Community Health Services.
  • External (e.g. GPs) faxed referrals will be digitised and analysed via a purpose built technology solution.
  • Clinicians including medical specialists will move from paper triage to electronic triage in-system. Clinicians will be able to triage referrals anyway, anytime.
  • eRMS will also send patient notifications by email or SMS (depending on patient preference and consent) once the referral is complete, as well as sending GPs secure electronic status updates once the referral is complete.

The systems benefits include more standardised referrals, consistent and standard referral processing procedures and improved clinician, staff and patient experience. The system will help reduce the use of paper and lost referrals/pieces of paper.

The system will be evaluated to determine if it is to be rolled out to more services, which would include making those services eReferral capable.

eReferrals

NNSWLHD has made a limited number of services eReferral-capable.

As mentioned above, if eRMS is rolled out to more services, this will allow those services to be made eReferral capable at the same time.

Fax coversheet

NNSWLHD now requires a faxed referral coversheet for faxed referrals to all NNSWLHD Outpatient, Community and Allied Health Services.

Please click this link to read more about why.

The fax coversheet can be downloaded in 4 versions:

Fax digitisation

As part of the implementation of the project, NNSWLHD has built a secure Microsoft Azure-based solution to:

  • Digitise Faxed Referrals;
  • Analyse the text to determine if the document is a referral or not; and
  • If it is a referral, send to the eRMS with extracted text plus the referral; or
  • Email it to the destination service for handling if not a referral.

The fax coversheet is an important enabler of the technology piece, as it ensures NNSWLHD receives a complete set of the required information via fax. This speeds up referral processing and triage times.

New fax numbers

The following services are now using new fax numbers in support of this change. Please update any records accordingly. A link to each service’s HealthPathway can be accessed by clicking on the service name.

eReferrals Trial

NNSWLHD has been running an eReferrals trial since June 2020. One of the components – the LHD’s Referral Management System – will be replaced by the eRMS.

GPs and other referrers will continue to use HealthLink SmartForms.

More detail about the trial is here.