San Francisco General Hospital

Reducing Specialty Appointment Wait Times Using eReferral

In an effort to reduce wait times for specialty appointments, UCSF and San Francisco General Hospital developed and launched eReferral, a Web-based electronic referral system integrated into the hospital’s electronic health record. To request a consultation, a primary care clinician from any of the 26 participating community clinics initiates an electronic referral form. Clinician-reviewers then screen requests to evaluate urgency, choice of specialties, whether sufficient workup information is provided, and whether a specialist needs to see the patient or can guide the primary care clinician through the eReferral system. As a result, clinics saw up to a 90 percent reduction in wait times. Referrals deemed inappropriate by specialists were more than halved, and in some specialties expedited visits accounted for up to a third of all visits. This model for this approach has also been implemented at some Veterans Affairs Medical Centers and Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers in California. Use of a system like eReferral could address some of the variations in care documented in Medicare over the past two decades, and could improve Medicaid patients’ access to specialists’ expertise.

To learn more about this innovative program, please click here.

Or contact the innovator:
Alice Hm Chen, MD, MPH
Director, eReferral Medical Services
University of California San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital
Box 1364
San Francisco, CA 94143
(415) 206-4049
E-mail: [email protected]