Smithville Family Health Team's
eConsult Delegate Workflow
The
Smithville Family Health Team
has been finding great success with eConsult by implementing a delegate model. "
Using eConsult, our team has reduced the number of referrals required for our patients by using eConsult to ask specialists clinical questions and get timely answers in a secure portal
, " said Wendy Fisher, Executive Director.
The team has recently found that they can reduce some of the administrative burden on their physicians by implementing a delegate model. This reduces the frequency that the physicians need to log into the eConsult portal and frees up time for them to work on the clinical aspects of their practice.
The following are the steps the administrative staff at Smithville Family Health Team took to create an eConsult workflow for Telus Practice Solutions (PS).
- eConsult is added to the address book in Practice Solutions.
- Physician navigates to the Consultations Tab and selects the specialty they require. They add ‘eConsult’ in the Consultant’s Name field.
- Physician creates a letter in the patient file, indicating the speciality and urgency, adds any necessary attachments and adds to ‘Print Later’ list.
- Physician messages the secretary (acting as a Delegate) indicating they like to send an eConsult for the patient. The delegate saves the letter as a PDF to the computer’s desktop.
- The delegate logs into eConsult and selects a HNHB specialist if known/available, or selects the speciality from the BASE model.
- The delegate copy and pastes from the referral letter and sends the eConsult from within OTNHub.
- When the delegate is notified of the specialist's response, the delegate logs into eConsult, downloads the response, and uploads to the EMR in the patient file, which sends a notification to the physician.
- A custom form stamp is created in PS Suite to mimic the questions of the eConsult survey. The physician can answer the survey from directly in the EMR and the results will be messaged to the delegate to upload to eConsult.