Hi John,
We recently initiated steps to better track our external referrals as well. Until this year, we had not utilized the service provider dictionary and therefore could not provide accurate reporting without the discrete data. We employed the services of Hayes Management to help us with any needed EMR changes as well as process and workflow. We built out the service provider dictionary to include first our preferred external providers and specifically the specialties we do not have in our organization. We then began adding the other ones we refer to most frequently. Hayes did this based on the information we provided them and added details such as full addresses, sex of the provider, etc. to give the clinicians an option to search for what they need. We are still working through setting up our preferred providers, but this can also be done in the service provider dictionary to help narrow your network.
Another step that we took was to remove the generic external referral order and created 4 external referral orders with reasons for the referral included:
1. External- Difficult appt access w/in <insert home organization>
2. External- Specialty not available w/in ...
3. External- Patient preference/ location
4. External- Provider preference
We do not have enough data yet to evaluate the value of this information, but our hope was to try to identify trends with our own internal access issues and opportunities where our providers needed more information about our own internal services and specialties.
We also centralized our referrals team. This team works all referrals and selects the providers requested by our providers from the service provider dictionary if not already done by the clinician. They are also the ones that send the CCD to those external providers for the MIPS HIE measure.
Here are the details on how the report is generated:
We run a custom report using the ORDERS, USR, and SERVPROV tables to get a count of external orders each month by user. If the user that entered the order is an eligible provider (USR.IS_EP = 1) then we count them by name and then we group the rest into "non-provider". We know they're external referrals because we the order description says "External - " with the reason (patient preference, specialty not available, etc.)
You may need to use SQL Developer, Toad, or another query tool to create this because I don't believe BI captures the required fields by default.
This may be more detail than you wanted but I hope at least some of it is helpful.
Posted : August 29, 2017 4:53 am
