As you know from your own work as a family physician, oftentimes when we make referrals to specialists we may not need the whole meal deal. We may not need a complete workup or assessment from them. It may be a referral just to answer a few questions.
We used to do this through what we called the hallway consult, when a lot of health care was delivered rurally or when family doctors practised more in-patient medicine or in-hospital medicine. Oftentimes we would stop a specialist in the hallway and ask him a few questions about a difficult case we were having, and that would prevent a referral.
That's a process this project is trying to recreate. There are always going to be some patients whose cases are very complex and are going to need more than an electronic version of a hallway consult. This project isn't about reducing those referrals. Think of a Venn diagram: it's more about getting that overlap in the middle. As you can tell, 43% of referrals were avoided, so that's quite a large overlap.