Draft-first

Who this page is for: a practice manager who wants to know exactly who is accountable for what leaves the practice.

Draft-first is the simplest rule in the product: nothing leaves Refera without a named staff member approving it. Refera prepares; a person reviews and approves; the practice sends under its own name. Referrer correspondence remains editable. Patient-booking outreach uses a fixed, read-only server template so the browser cannot substitute unsealed copy.

What gets drafted

• A patient-booking call guide after a person marks the administratively complete referral ready for booking follow-up. The receptionist verifies identity, contact detail, authority and the safe channel/voicemail approach, then uses the practice’s own phone. Optional SMS or email copy is available only for a verified channel. Its version, SHA-256 digest and exact fixed text are sealed before that committed text is copied. Where the practice separately enables the mailbox-scoped Microsoft 365 sending tier, a named staff member may instead approve that exact fixed email for one send from the practice mailbox.
• An acknowledgement to the referring practice. This is a separate, secondary workflow - it never stands in for contacting the patient to arrange an appointment.
• A missing-information request back to the referring practice when an administrative field such as a Medicare number or date of birth is missing.
• A ready-to-enter card for your EMR, field by field.

Every draft is administrative. Draft content never contains clinical interpretation - the same wall that keeps urgency verbatim keeps drafts administrative.

Approving booking copy alone does not contact the patient. Staff make the call, use the verified practice channel, or explicitly choose the separately enabled Microsoft send action. A Microsoft 202 Accepted result is recorded only as accepted for processing, never as delivery or patient contact. Staff record the actual contact outcome separately. A booking is complete only when a staff member confirms it in the practice’s own PMS or booking provider. Refera records the closed loop; it does not create a second diary. See Patient booking worklist.

Where edits are expected

Referrer drafts can be wrong. That is why nothing is sent without a person approving it, and every approval is logged in the sealed chain. Those drafts can be edited before approval. Patient booking outreach is intentionally different: staff choose only a verified channel and approve the fixed server template. A policy-level wording change belongs in the governed practice template, not in an arbitrary per-patient browser edit.

The approval step is the error firewall

An extraction mistake cannot reach a GP or a record, because a person reviews every draft first. This is not a courtesy step layered on top - it is the mechanism that makes an imperfect reader safe to use at the front door. The failure modes it guards are listed honestly on What Refera does not do.

Sealed, every time

Every approval is recorded as an event in the chain of custody: who approved, the exact approved artefact and when. Where an optional send follows, its provider outcome is recorded separately as accepted for processing, refused or unknown. The practice holds dated, tamper-evident proof without turning provider acceptance into a delivery claim.