Improving patient data exchange across healthcare systems
A regional care network connected scheduling, records, and referrals on a standards-based platform, reducing referral turnaround and duplicate testing.
Regional care network · 6 clinics, 1 specialty center
The challenge
Each clinic in the network used its own scheduling and records system. Referrals between sites traveled by fax and phone, and a specialist often received a patient with no visible history, leading to repeated labs and imaging the patient had already completed.
Clinicians logged into three or four systems per shift, and front-desk staff spent hours each week confirming whether a referral had been received, scheduled, or completed.
The solution
The network adopted Auliq's health platform, unifying identity, scheduling, records, and referral workflows on standards-based APIs. A referral is now a tracked record with status, owning clinician, and attached history visible to both sending and receiving sites.
Single sign-on gives each clinician one login across all sites, and patient summaries follow the referral automatically, including recent results and medications.
The implementation
The network started with its busiest clinic as a pilot, migrating scheduling and referrals first while records remained read-only from the legacy system. The pilot ran one full quarter before the remaining sites followed in two waves.
Data mapping, particularly for patient identifiers across systems, took the largest share of effort. Front-desk staff were involved from the first design session, which surfaced workflow details that would otherwise have been missed.
The results
Referral turnaround fell from an average of nine days to two, with status visible to everyone in the loop instead of tracked through phone calls. Clinicians reported noticeably fewer duplicate tests as patient summaries began traveling with referrals.
The network now measures referral cycle time as a standing operational metric, and new sites onboard by joining the existing workflow rather than standing up a parallel process.
"The referral used to be a phone call and a hope. Now it is a record we can see, act on, and measure."
Director of Clinical Operations