Automate the capture, triage, and routing of inbound referrals so every patient reaches the right service within NHS constitutional standards.
NHS trusts and private providers receive referrals via e-RS, email, fax, and internal forms. Without a single tracking system, referrals stall in shared inboxes, breach two-week-wait targets, and create patient safety risks that surface only when a complaint is raised.
Cancer and urgent referrals routinely breach the 14-day target because there is no automated escalation when a referral sits unactioned for more than 24 hours.
Clinicians re-refer when they receive no acknowledgement, creating duplicate records that waste clinic capacity and distort waiting-list data.
Primary care has no way to confirm a referral was received and accepted, resulting in phone calls that consume admin time across both organisations.
Paper-based or email tracking cannot produce the timestamped audit trail CQC inspectors expect under Regulation 17 (Good Governance).
Purpose-built capabilities — not generic templates you have to work around.
Ingest referrals from e-RS, email, portal submissions, and scanned letters into a single normalised queue with automatic data extraction.
Rules-based engine routes each referral to the correct specialty, consultant, or MDT based on clinical coding, urgency flags, and capacity.
Real-time countdown timers against RTT, two-week-wait, and internal SLA clocks with escalation triggers at configurable thresholds.
Instant confirmation sent to the referring clinician with a unique tracking reference, reducing follow-up calls by up to 80%.
Mandatory-field checks reject incomplete referrals at the point of entry and return them to the referrer with clear instructions on what is missing.
The system captures the referral from e-RS, email, or portal and extracts patient demographics, clinical narrative, and urgency markers.
Mandatory-field rules check completeness while fuzzy matching detects duplicates against existing open referrals for the same patient and specialty.
The referral is routed to the appropriate clinician or MDT coordinator who reviews, accepts, or returns to sender with feedback.
Accepted referrals automatically trigger a booking task in the scheduling workflow, linking the referral record to the appointment slot.
Once the patient is seen, the referral is closed with an outcome code that feeds performance dashboards and commissioner returns.
Try these tools to assess and improve your operations.
SwiftCase can ingest referrals forwarded from e-RS via email or HL7 feed. Direct API integration depends on your trust's integration engine and HSCN connectivity.
Yes. Each referral carries independent clock calculations for two-week-wait, 18-week RTT, and any local SLAs, with separate escalation rules for each.
Rejected referrals are returned to the referrer with a structured reason code and free-text guidance. The original record is retained for audit purposes and the clock is paused or stopped per NHS rules.
See how SwiftCase gives every referral a trackable, auditable pathway from receipt to first appointment.
