Community health · Ontario · case study
A referral portal that could explain itself
Referrals moved off fax and onto a logged, auditable path between eleven clinics.
Referrals between clinics moved by fax, phone and a shared inbox. Nobody could say where a patient sat, and the compliance review each year was a reconstruction exercise.
What we built
A narrow application: send a referral, accept it, book it, close it. Roles map to how the clinics actually staff rather than to an ideal process. Nothing is stored that the workflow does not need, and the audit trail is a first-class screen rather than a log file.
The hard part
It was not the software. Eleven clinics had eleven habits, so the rollout went clinic by clinic with a named contact who could push back. Two of the changes to the design came from them, and both were right.