The Patient Referral chapter defines the message set used in patient referral communications between mutually exclusive healthcare entities. These referral transactions frequently occur between entities with different methods and systems of capturing and storing data. Such transactions frequently traverse a path connecting primary care providers, specialists, payors, government agencies, hospitals, labs, and other healthcare entities. The availability, completeness, and currency of information for a given patient will vary greatly across such a spectrum.
The referral in this specification is viewed from the perspective of the provider as an individual, irrespective of his/her affiliation with a specific institution or campus. Events triggering this kind of message are not restricted to a hospital environment, but have a community-wide area of impact in which more extensive identification of patients and healthcare providers is needed. Therefore, a referral must contain adequate identification information to meet the broadly varying requirements of the dissimilar systems within the community.
This chapter describes the various events and resulting transactions that make up the referral message set. Examples have been provided to demonstrate the use of this specification within the events described. Each event example centers on a primary care provider's encounter with a patient. All of the examples in this chapter have been constructed using the HL7 Encoding Rules.