Why the front door

Who this page is for: a practice manager who recognises the Monday-morning referral pile and wants the problem named precisely.

In Australia, a Medicare-rebated specialist visit needs a GP referral, typically valid for 12 months - so referrals are the growth pipe. Specialist, GP and allied-health practices alike take them in as a fragmented mix of email, secure messaging on HealthLink or Medical-Objects, fax and paper, then type them in by hand.

Four channels, no queue

Email to the practice address, secure messages on HealthLink or Medical-Objects, fax and paper all land in different places - and the practice does not choose the rail, the referrer’s software does. Industry estimates put fax use at 80 to 90 per cent of Australian healthcare organisations (PwC and industry estimates), so the mix is not going away soon.

Typed in by hand

No EMR auto-captures fax, email or paper referrals - they are scanned and re-keyed by hand, everywhere. That manual pile is slow, easy to lose, and invisible to any report that only reads what was already typed into the system.

New patients fall outside the rails

A new-patient referral is never auto-filed by any EMR - there is no existing record to match it to, even on electronic rails. The manual queue looks different in each system, but it is always a manual queue:

• On Best Practice, it sits unallocated in Incoming Reports.
• On Zedmed, it lands against a blank patient in the Results Inbox.
• On Genie and Gentu, it appears as an unlinked patient.

The person a referral is about is exactly the person your EMR does not know yet. That is why the front door matters: the highest-value document in the practice is the one most likely to be handled by hand.

What the front door changes

Referrals from connected channels land in one arrival-ordered queue before manual entry. Staff approve every draft. The practice keeps the proof trail. The mechanics are on The four workers; how each channel connects is under Connectors.