Patient referral from one doctor to another doctor

It is very common requirement that a doctor has to refer a patient to another doctor. The referred by Doctor should be able to convey various details about the patient like why he/she is referring this patient. Also, the referred to Doctor can accept/reject the referral and also would like to perform actions like scheduling an appointment for the patient. We can use forms to do this but it is not effective and moreover, these are not observations. Do we have any app/module that does this functionality? Did anyone implement this using the existing modules?

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Well, you can treat ‘referral’ as an order. (FHIR actually treats it like one as ReferralRequest). You can do something like this in Orders tab

  1. Have a group (maybe do department wise or type) in the orders section. You can type some comments, but not details. Orders table has a column “comment_to_fulfiller” which can be used.
  2. You can use different queues to list the referral types.
  3. Then use the ‘order fulfilment’.

The problem is that in Step 1, you will probably want to add more information like the specific provider (orders table does not have any column for that), or a different facility (no provision for that too). And its probably best to define a specific interface.

What I would instead suggest is

  1. Use Forms 2.0, where you can define additional components too if you want
  2. Extend the form not just to include observations, but other details. Our Forms 2.0 supports that, but will need additional work to support non obs data. The design is already there, but you need to extend
  3. GET/POST to another API other than EMR API. The facility is already there to some extent.
  4. Use the orders table (create a different order type), create a separate table for referral details (provider, facility etc). Note support for location, provider are already there in the forms 2.0, as complex obs, but you will probably have to extend that.
  5. Use a fulfilment form for referral - that will update the status of the order and other details.
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