No clinical triage

Who this page is for: the practice manager or principal asking the sharpest diligence question there is - “is this a medical device?”

The simple rule is: Refera tracks referral admin only. It does not triage patients.

What the position means in practice

Refera organises referral admin and prepares drafts for staff to check. It does not rank urgency, suggest a diagnosis or make clinical decisions. Any urgency shown is copied from the referral and linked to its source. Attachments are listed, never interpreted. Refera never auto-sends or contacts a patient by itself. Only named practice staff use the practice’s own email, SMS or phone and record what happened.

How it is enforced by design, not tone

• The extraction schema has no field a clinical judgement could occupy. There is nowhere for a computed urgency, acuity or severity value to live - the absence is structural.
• The queue is arrival-ordered and never re-sorts. No ranking exists to smuggle a judgement into. See Verbatim urgency.
• Every outbound artefact is a human-approved draft. A person reviews, edits and approves; the practice sends under its own name. See Draft-first.
• Booking remains in the practice system. Refera can track patient contact and the staff-confirmed booking milestone, but it does not choose a slot or create a parallel diary. See Patient booking worklist.
• The docs and marketing are linted. The claim discipline is a build gate on this documentation, not a style preference.

What that means for the practice

Clinical judgement stays exactly where it belongs - with the practice’s clinicians and staff. Refera’s job is to make sure the document carrying that judgement is captured, intact, acknowledged and provable. The intended-purpose statement is signed off by TGA-experienced counsel before any real patient data flows - one of the go-live gates.

Practices may expect a connected referral product to prioritise referrals clinically. Refera does not. Why Refera never prioritises referrals explains the HealthLink boundary and the controls that keep clinical decision-making with the practice.