I want to highlight this as an important topic from a primary care perspective.
I dream of a future where referrals are made & automatically tracked from within a PMS (or equivalent), where patients can view the status on their online portal, and PMSs can selectively flag (through API updates within the PMS) only relevant issues (e.g. delays) to the referring clinician. As far as Iām aware this is not yet happening. Bring it on!
Secondary care providers also refer to other secondary care providers. And also sometimes to GPs (i.e. patient found to be significantly hypertensive perioperatively), or people in other parts of the country (or even overseas). Further complicating this is the public / private divide - it isnāt smart from an overall system perspective to silo referrals between them!
Any effective system has to be designed to accommodate these multi-directional, cross-sector, and cross-border aspects, and be broadly accessible by providers and patients.
Iām familiar with ERMS from a Canterbury primary care perspective - are you saying this solution is too siloed at the other end? As opposed to a semi-successful modular solution that could be better integrated into a PMS?
Iām only peripherally familiar with ERMS Iām afraid - but suspect that it was designed with a fairly tight scope of Primary ā Secondary care (which is hard enough). It does cover private and public secondary care, which is a major bonus though!!
Iām not sure that the order has a lot of meaning regarding priorities. But yes, point noted!
Complex topic for sure. I have some visibility from an Orion eReferrals perspective and related functionality. Our solution is deployed in both Northern and Te Waipounamu regions. In the south it manages triage of inbound (from primary care) referrals as well as all internal referrals (across secondary locations).
We also were one of the parties involved in supporting referrals for the Female Pelvic Mesh programme requiring collaboration (facilitated by HNZ) with ERMS, BPAC and Healthlink to integrate referrals (incl patients self-referring to the service) into 2 hubs (one northern and one southern). In order to support this all the providers of referral solutions noted had to integrate with the PMS vendors (at least Medtech and Indici, maybe also My Practice and Intrahealth).
Lastly on related requirements for appointment booking and viewing HNZ ran an ROI to check whatās in the market. This closed early Oct, and was expected to progress (demoās of what was proposed, followed potentially by a closed RFP) with implementation commencing February 2026. To date there has been no update since the ROI closed so I am not sure where this now stands.
The ROI was run via GETS so the docs incl requirements etc should be available in the public domain or from HNZ (although since it closed they may not be prepared to release them (or require an OIA request). I have the ROI docs so if anyone is interested please get in touch via chat and we can talk.
Central and Te Mawa Taki have not made as much progress on referrals (into and intra secondary care) to my knowledge but I am hoping we see progress in the coming year as it is a key enabler to targets (like faster access to cancer treatment, shorter FSA waits etc).
Fair enough! Though Community HealthPathways is pretty helpful 