Graphical User Interface for Centralized Healthcare Referral Coordination
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional patient intake, placement, and transfer methods in healthcare systems are time-consuming, prone to errors, and fail to provide sufficient coordination between disparate healthcare departments, leading to inefficiencies and longer transition times for patients.
Innovation Solution
A centralized electronic management system that aggregates and coordinates patient and asset information across healthcare departments, facilitating seamless transitions through the continuum of care by providing standardized referral forms and notifications, ensuring data compatibility and real-time communication among clinicians.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of time
If traditional patient intake, placement, and transfer methods are used, then current processes can be maintained with existing systems, but the processes are time-consuming and result in longer transition times for patients
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges disparate healthcare information systems into a unified centralized system that coordinates patient intake, placement, and transfer across multiple healthcare departments. This integration eliminates silos and enables real-time data sharing, directly reducing patient transition times and improving overall healthcare productivity.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements real-time feedback mechanisms that automatically update patient status, bed availability, and department capacity information across all healthcare departments. This continuous feedback loop enables rapid coordination and reduces delays in patient transfer by ensuring all departments are informed of current status changes immediately.
2Reliability
If traditional manual coordination methods are used between healthcare departments, then system complexity remains low, but coordination between disparate departments is insufficient and error-prone
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a centralized electronic management system as an intermediary between disparate healthcare department systems. This intermediary coordinates information flow, standardizes data formats, and ensures accurate communication between departments without requiring each department to directly interface with every other system, thereby improving reliability while managing complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The centralized system provides universal functionality across all healthcare departments, serving as a common platform for patient intake, placement, and transfer coordination. This multi-functional approach consolidates multiple specialized systems into one unified platform, improving coordination accuracy while reducing overall system complexity through standardization.
3Productivity
If traditional referral processes are used, then existing workflows can be maintained, but referral coordination between departments is inefficient and lacks standardized information exchange
Solution Approach 1:
The patent standardizes referral information by changing the parameters of data exchange between departments. The system implements standardized fields, data types, and formats for referral information, transforming unstructured manual referrals into structured electronic data. This parameter standardization dramatically improves referral processing efficiency while making the system easier to operate through automation.
Data Source
AI summary
One embodiment provides a method, the method including: receiving, at a centralized electronic management system, a set of referral requirements for each of a plurality of health care departments within a health system; creating, using the centralized electronic management system, a referral requirement form for each of the plurality of health care departments by creating a plurality of data entry fields associated with the set of referral requirements; receiving, at the centralized electronic management system, a referral request from a referring clinician to one of the plurality of health care departments, wherein the referral request is provided based upon the referral requirement form for the one of the plurality of health care departments; and providing, from the centralized electronic management system to the one of the plurality of health care departments, a referral notification generated responsive to the referral request.