AHS says it’s looking into thousands of patient referral delays

Alberta Health Services (AHS) says in a release it is taking immediate action to expedite care for patients who may have been impacted by delayed referrals to community healthcare providers.

An internal AHS audit completed in late September revealed that some patient referrals to external healthcare providers in Central Zone were not properly processed. In some cases, this has caused a delay in care.

Further investigation determined that the issue was not limited to Central Zone, and that some patients in all five AHS zones (Central, North, Edmonton, Calgary, South) may have been impacted.

“AHS takes any potential impact to patient care very seriously, and we are deeply sorry for any patient care delays. Our clinical teams are working urgently to assess every delayed referral, to determine what impact the delay may have had on each patient and to schedule those patients as quickly as possible.”

AHS says they will directly contact every patient where potential for adverse clinical impact has occurred. Patients will be provided with the opportunity to address any questions and concerns they might have.

“AHS is dedicated to providing Albertans with the high-quality care they need, when they need it, and we are deeply sorry that some patients did not receive that in a timely way,” said Athana Mentzelopoulos, President and CEO, AHS.

“We welcome this third-party review and look forward to working closely with HQCA to ensure that our systems have robust safeguards in place that will prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

While AHS is reviewing a large number of referrals to ensure a clear picture of the issue, to date, the potentially affected patients are a small number of the total referrals being assessed.

This issue applies to referrals from AHS to healthcare providers who are outside of AHS and not Connect Care users, such as specialty clinics and allied health professions (for example, physiotherapists).

These providers operate in partnership with AHS but work in a community setting, and typically have their own electronic medical record system that does not allow for referrals to easily flow from Connect Care to their systems directly.

On average, AHS issues approximately 100,000 referrals annually. AHS has also implemented several measures to prevent this in the future, including increasing training for processing patient referrals, improved auditing to mitigate future challenges, and improving electronic delivery of outgoing referrals. AHS will work closely with the Health Quality Council of Alberta, as part of their independent, third-party review into this issue.