On 09/10/2010 23:35, Saul Galloway wrote:
> Does anyone have either first hand audit data of the breakdown of
> referrals by specialty and/or reason or know of any UK research data
> about this?
>
I did get a little funding under PBC to do some referral analysis
although I was more interested in provider behaviour and what was
happening to patients.
We looked at three questions
1. Patients bouncing back to outpatients. There are a large number of
patient ending up with a "new" appointment (hence more expensive) when
they have had a previous appointment with the same speciality at the
same provider within three months. There are a few reasons for this but
the disincentive to make follow up appointment to hit the new/follow up
ratio seems to be a biggie.
2. Referrals against QOF registers. QOF registers for diabetes, IHD and
epilepsy against endocrinology, cardiology and neurology referral. Jury
still out on that one.
3. Referral concordance. If a patient is referral to speciality A what
is the chance they will also be referred to speciality B? This was meant
to give some ideas for service improvement. For instance 20% of patients
with a referral to geriatrics were also referred to cardiology. Digging
down it seems these are mainly patients with AF who the geriatricians
are referring for a cardio opinion, mainly an echo.
I have the Access queries if anyone wants them. They are fairly horrible
SQL.
--
Gavin Jamie
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