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CS114
Automating Referrals from Admission Assessment Screening
By M. Furukawa; UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA
For further information, please contact: MFurukawa@mednet.ucla.edu
Purpose: Referrals to ancillary departments when patients require specialized assessment is a part of the admission assessment process that was not always consistently done. We needed to improve compliance with making required referrals to ancillary departments and also create a way to verify that the ancillary department responded to the referral.
Description: UCLA Medical Center is moving from a paper-based documentation system to a computerized clinical information system (CIS). We felt that automating the admission assessment screening and referral process would improve compliance with making referrals. We worked with our CIS vendor to create a special script to automate referrals from the admission assessment note. Once nurses check "yes" to any referral trigger statement in screens for nutrition, abuse, social services or infection control, an automatic referral is generated to the ancillary department and a referral note is made in the patient chart. The ancillary staff chart in the CIS after they see the patient, which closes the loop on the referral process.
Evaluation and Outcomes: Once the script was running, ancillary departments found that they received too many referrals because their triggers were too broad and vague. We made our referral triggers more specific, which ensured that appropriate referrals were generated. Compliance with making required referrals greatly increased with the automated referrals. With ancillary documentation in the same system, it is clear that they evaluated the patient. We were able to show JCAHO surveyors that required referrals to ancillary departments were consistently made and that they responded to the referrals in a timely manner.
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