Referrals are an important “front door” for consumers to become patients of UCSF Health and existing patients to expand their use of UCSF Health. Referrals from external referring providers typically arrive via fax, entering a referrals management process that is manual, cumbersome, and inefficient, requiring manual data entry to the electronic health record (EHR) and then often phone-tag back and forth between UCSF and the patient in attempts to complete the referral and schedule the appointment. This all results in delays in patients’ access to care, negative patient experience, and increased operational costs.

At UCSF Health, our goal is to schedule 75% of new patient referrals within 0-5 days, and we have historically failed to hit that mark. In 2018, we estimated that more than 46,000 patients referred to UCSF could not be accommodated in part due to this current process.

UCSF Health has started addressing these problems through its Referrals Automation Program, part of our larger Digital Patient Experience Initiative. We will discuss how we used product management principles to understand the problem, build and validate a solution, and roll it out across multiple practices at UCSF Health.

Slides: https://ucsf.box.com/s/lvot50s6ioxp8xxasqky4ke7wy9s1u5o (MyAccess login required)