Software and consultancy provider, Hicom, announces it is automating consultant and diagnostic referral processes and providing a paperless environment through the design and implementation of purpose-built technology interfaces at Sports Surgery Clinic (SSC)one of the first dedicated orthopaedic and sports surgery clinics in Europe.
SSC conducts approximately 12,500 surgical referrals a year for treatment for orthopaedic, spinal, sports and exercise related injuries. The clinic has been using Hicom’s clinical management solution, Enterprise, which provides end-to-end management of the administrative process within the hospital, for nine years. With the go-live of this new interface, which Hicom has designed to meet SSC’s unique requirements, 25 of the consultants who provide referrals can now export referral data to the admissions department in just one click. The clinic has also gone live with an interface for its diagnostic referrals.
Prior to this development, SSC operated a paper-based process for its referrals, which proved to be labour intensive for both consultants and the admissions team.
The manual tasks that could take the admissions team up to 10-20 minutes to fully complete and check has been made automatic and seamless, and now takes between 3-6 minutes. Additionally, consultants have the option to add multiple attachments to the electronic referral form, when they would previously have had to print and fax the documents.
Margaret English, Business Applications Manager at SSC comments: “With the introduction of the electronic referral system, the data that is now being transferred between our teams is not only super fast but is more accurate and any risk of duplication is removed. We have also been able to set some mandatory fields so consultants cannot send a referral to us without certain data, whereas on the paper based system, we had problems enforcing this.”
