Patient booking worklist

Who this page is for: reception staff and practice managers who need referrals turned into booked appointments, not left in another inbox.

The job Refera helps finish

After a person marks the administratively complete referral Ready to enter, Refera puts it on the To contact worklist. Field completeness alone never starts patient outreach. An already entered referral also remains recoverable as booking work, so closing referral intake cannot hide an unfinished patient follow-up. The primary next step is usually a phone call to arrange an appointment.

The whole reception team sees the same queue in strict original referral arrival order. Approval takes a short, expiring work lease in the named staff member’s identity so two receptionists do not call at once. The holder and expiry stay visible; an expired lease returns the task to the team. This is temporary collision protection, not permanent assignment and never a private task list.

Each referral detail also has a compact administrative tracker: Received -> Details checked -> Ready to contact -> Contact attempted -> Booked in practice system. It is derived only from the sealed administrative record and shows the available handler/time evidence. It never represents clinical progress. Practices keep using their PMS for internal messaging; Refera does not add a second staff chat surface.

Acknowledging receipt to the referring practice is still useful, but it is a separate, secondary action. An acknowledgement never marks the patient contacted or booked.

The safe, human-owned sequence

1. Open the oldest arrival. Active work always preserves the referral’s original arrival order. Staff-set next actions and overdue markers stay visible, but never move a referral ahead of an earlier arrival. No clinical signal changes that order.
2. Before disclosure, verify patient identity, the contact details being used, the practice’s authority or consent basis, and the safe contact approach. That last check covers voicemail and any guardian, representative, interpreter or PMS instruction that applies. Refera seals the yes/no attestation, not extra sensitive explanatory copy.
3. Call from the practice’s own phone. If the practice permits SMS or email, staff may instead use that verified channel. A verified phone or email is enough for the corresponding channel. Refera’s server prepares one fixed, read-only template and seals its version, SHA-256 digest and exact text before the browser copies that committed text. Staff cannot substitute client-edited copy in the approval event. If the Owner separately enables the exact-mailbox Microsoft 365 sending tier, a named authorised staff member may choose Approve and send email for that one exact message. Refera never auto-sends or calls independently. Microsoft acceptance is not recorded as delivery or contact, and an unknown result is never retried automatically.
4. Record the real outcome. An unsuitable offered time remains active follow-up; it is not the same as the patient declining the service or referral. Unable to contact requires a staff member to confirm the practice’s own follow-up and escalation policy. Refera does not invent a universal attempt count.
5. Book in the practice’s existing PMS, HotDoc, Healthengine or other booking system. Staff then record the exact system or diary name and appointment date/time, then make a fresh attestation that the appointment exists there. Refera seals the system id and label, the entered local time, its server-normalised instant in the practice timezone, and the staff actor/time. The completed record says Recorded as booked in [system] by [staff] at [time].

One booking source of truth

Refera does not create an appointment slot or keep a parallel diary. The practice’s existing booking system remains authoritative. A configured public booking page may be opened, copied or included in generic SMS or email copy, but it must be a static public HTTPS address. Refera never adds patient identifiers, referral details or authentication tokens to that link.

The appointment date/time saved at the final action is audit evidence for the staff-confirmed external record. Refera does not check the external system, calculate availability, reserve a time, send reminders or use that value to order the referral queue.

Exact worklist states

• To contact - a human marked the referral ready for the administrative booking workflow. The underlying state is explicit that outreach is not yet prepared until the fixed draft is approved.
• Follow-up due - staff set a dated next action after a contact attempt.
• Waiting on patient - a message was left or the patient needs to respond.
• Booked in practice system - named staff freshly attested to the exact external system and appointment date/time. The external system remains the source of truth.
• Patient declined - staff recorded that the patient declined the service or referral, not just one offered appointment time.
• Unable to contact - staff explicitly confirmed the practice contact and escalation policy before finalising no response.
• Reopened - practice staff deliberately returned a settled item to active work.

Draft approval, Microsoft transport outcome, an actual contact attempt and an externally recorded booking are separate events. This prevents a copied or Microsoft-accepted draft from being mistaken for patient contact, or contact from being mistaken for a booking. Referral intake settlement is separate too: entering the referral in the PMS does not erase unfinished booking work, and reopening booking follow-up does not reopen referral intake.

What this workflow never does

It does not rank patients clinically, recommend an appointment timeframe, infer urgency, select a clinician, invent availability or book without staff. Any future appointment-first reconciliation would be a separately designed and governed roadmap feature; the current workflow begins only after Refera receives a referral.