Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust uses RIVIAM’s referral management solution to deliver Children & Family Health Service
Benefits of RIVIAM
- Increases team productivity by removing manual processes, saving clinical triage time and improving care co-ordination.
- Increases patient safety by providing a safer way of collecting information from referrers and the ability to prioritise incoming work.
- Increases referrer satisfaction by enabling them to provide the right information, first time.
Managing demand
The Children and Family Health Service (CFHS) is delivered by a partnership of three Surrey NHS partners: Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust; CSH Surrey and First Community Health and Care. It brings together physical and emotional health services for 290,000 children across Surrey and parts of north east Hampshire and their families and carers.
In April 2018, “One Stop”, the centralised referral and triage service for CFHS, decided that going digital was the only answer to safely managing the caseload and meeting their service KPIs. Some referrals were sent in via the portal, others by email or post, and some were received over the telephone. The reliance on capturing referral information on paper and in spreadsheets was introducing too many risks to patient safety and delays.
The team needed a secure online system and decided to adopt RIVIAM’s Workflow services. They had been using RIVIAM’s secure web portal and referral forms since July 2017 for receiving referrals online.
Children's Referral Portal for Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
Referral management
RIVIAM’s digital referral forms are configurable micro-websites. They provide a real-time way of collecting referral information from referrers in a standardised online template. RIVIAM worked closely with CFHS to configure the referral portal and forms to their exact requirements, customising them with the right branding and adding FAQs.
For referrers, the online referral form is quick and easy to complete, and any associated documents can be added. Once a referrer has submitted information about a child’s referral, they receive an email notification confirming receipt. Seconds after the referral is sent it appears in the RIVIAM Workflow service ready for processing and triage by the CFHS team.
Example workflow
Workflow tools
Each CFHS team member now has secure access to RIVIAM Workflow and can see the status of all incoming referrals which are organised into a sequence of steps and queues based on agreed rules.
A Red/Amber/Green (RAG) status is also assigned to each queue and is based on when the referral was received by the team. Red flags referrals that have been in the system the longest.
Team members can easily see an overview of the status of a referral, all actions and decisions which relate to it, lock it when they are working on it and unlock it when they have finished. It’s simple to carry out events and tasks as part of the workflow and everything is recorded and clearly presented.
Team leader using RIVIAM to co-ordinate care
Benefits to SABP of using RIVIAM
- Improves admin team productivity. There is no need to sort post, upload referrals and allocate them – this is all done automatically and managed into workflow.
- Improves decision-making. RIVIAM provides clarity and standardisation, enabling the team to work together more efficiently and to manage both professional and self-referrals in one place.
- Improves clinical team productivity. RIVIAM automatically filters referrals by priority making it easy for the CFHS triage team to see urgent requests.
- Reduces risks. Provides a convenient and safer way of collecting the right information from referrers first time, every time.
Stay in control of referrals
If you would like to understand more about our complete referral management solution please get in touch and we would be delighted to give you a demo.
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