Process states and chips

Who this page is for: anyone looking at a chip on screen and wanting its exact meaning in one line.

Every chip in Refera describes administrative process-state: where a referral sits in the practice’s own workflow, what could be read from the source, and whether the paperwork is complete and current. No chip anywhere carries a computed urgency, acuity or severity, and no state ever re-orders the queue - the order is arrival, always. Refera tracks referral admin only. It does not triage patients.

Queue states

The referral’s status chip in the inbox and on the worklist. A referral is in exactly one state at a time, and every transition is a staff action recorded as a sealed event.

State	Meaning	How it gets there
new	Captured and waiting for a first look	Automatic on arrival
in review	A staff member has opened it and is working it	Staff open the referral
waiting on referrer	A missing-information request has gone to the referring practice	Staff approve the request draft (shown as waiting on info on the worklist)
ready for EMR	Complete enough to enter - the handoff pack is ready	Staff mark it ready
entered in EMR	Staff confirmed it is filed in the EMR record	Staff confirm from the handoff pack
declined	The practice is not taking this referral	Staff decline, with a note
unmatched	The referrer could not be identified from the source	Automatic on a degraded source; queued for manual follow-up, never dropped

Completeness chips

What capture could and could not read from the source document. A missing field stays missing - Refera never invents a value.

Chip	Meaning
complete	All administrative fields were read from the source
missing Medicare number	No Medicare number could be read
missing date of birth	No date of birth could be read
missing contact details	No patient contact details could be read
missing reason for referral	No reason for referral could be read
unmatched referrer	The referrer could not be identified from the degraded source

The worklist shows the same chips in short form (missing Medicare no., missing DOB, missing contact, missing reason).

The verbatim urgency chip

The only urgency signal anywhere in the product: the referrer’s own words, quoted and attributed - for example, referrer wrote: “please see within two weeks”. It is never computed, never colour-ranked and never moves a row. Where the referrer stated nothing, there is no chip. See Verbatim urgency.

The repeat-referral chip

repeat referral - earlier REF_xxxx on the worklist means the same patient (normalised name plus exact date of birth) appeared on an earlier referral. It is an administrative dedupe and context fact - it never moves the row and carries no clinical meaning. Referrals whose own identity is incomplete can never anchor or carry the flag: unknown stays unknown.

Planned check-in validity chips

These chips belong to a tested design that is not available in the connected workspace today. The planned front-desk review would compare the referral’s written date. The windows are administrative billing rules (Medicare rebate validity), not clinical calls: GP referrals 12 months, specialist referrals 3 months, indefinite honoured, and plan-based allied-health referrals checked on their date frame only.

Chip	Meaning
Current	Inside its validity window
Current - plan check	Inside its date frame, but plan-based - confirm sessions remaining
Expiring	Close to the end of its window - confirm a current referral is on file
Expired	Past its validity window - check renewal before the consult
Unknown	No legible written date on the source - a person checks

The arrivals list rolls these up to one overall signal per patient: Clear, Flagged, Expired or Unknown. Every flag is soft: it prompts a staff follow-up, the patient is never turned away and no clinical judgement is made.

Check-in admin-checklist cards

Alongside the validity signal, the front-desk check-in review runs a practice-configurable administrative sweep and renders each check as one card that is either Confirmed or Flag - never anything in between, and never a clinical reading.

Card chip	Meaning
Confirmed	The administrative fact is present and in order
Flag	The fact is missing, unsigned, changed or not recorded - a soft staff follow-up item, never a block on the patient

The six checks are the referral validity window, Medicare number, referrer provider number, financial consent, patient form and current contact details. Each carries fixed, verbatim flag wording and can be switched off per practice; a check that is off shows no card. The full list, the exact flag sentences and the lines the feature never crosses are on The check-in admin checklist.

Closure verdicts

The design-only closure ledger answers “did this loop close” with three verdicts: CLOSED, OPEN and UNKNOWN - with UNKNOWN shown honestly for a person to resolve, never assumed closed. It remains a design-only feature outside the connected product; the full model is on The closure ledger.

Sealed event labels

Every entry in a referral’s hash-chained timeline carries one of these labels, verbatim:

received · fields extracted · match failed · possible duplicate flagged · review started · missing info requested · marked ready to enter · entered in EMR · declined · acknowledgement approved · marked duplicate · follow-up note logged · referrer identified · field corrected by staff

Corrections are events too: a staff fix is appended and sealed, never edited in place. See Chain of custody.

Channel identifiers

Every referral carries its arrival channel, shown as a coloured dot beside the row. The connected product supports verified email and fax-to-email sources; HealthLink is not connected and appears only after its written partner assessment, applicable technical profile and conformance process, interface-specific synthetic testing, and a reviewed reversible cutover. The reserved upload value is not a customer-selectable source today. The colour identifies the channel only; it never signals priority.

Related

• How Refera works - where each state sits in the journey.
• Glossary - the working vocabulary in plain sentences.