EDMONTON, Alberta, Aug. 22, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Joule -- the Canadian Medical Association’s newest company -- on August 15th, announced that ezReferral Inc. was a recipient of one of its 2017 Innovation grants. ezReferral 2.0 is a cloud based medical referral management system designed by Dr. Denis Vincent of Edmonton Alberta. Dr. Vincent through his years of practice and through personal experience recognized that the current process of managing referrals was flawed. Patients were and are still slipping through the cracks in healthcare systems around the world.
Faxing referrals from one office to another today is still the primary preferred system of referral management or “mismanagement” as Dr. Vincent puts it. “One of my patients went to emergency to be told by the attending physician that she needed to see a surgeon. The fax was sent to the surgeon’s office but the surgeon happened to be away from the office for a few months. When my patient came to see me, I quickly discovered that the referral was undelivered and most importantly I learned my patient had cancer and it had spread. Sadly, she died a year later.”
Dr. Vincent then decided it was time to change the way referrals were managed and to close the loop in the process. “What I have seen over the years is the patient and the referring physician have next to no ability to find out what stage of the process the referral is at,” he states. “Can you imagine not knowing if your referral is in a tray, lying on the floor, in a file or stuck because the fax machine is out of paper.”?
After 2 years ezReferral 2.0 is ready for the medical world. Automating the referral management process and ensuring that all parties are in the loop is what ezReferral does. Complete with fax integration, API’s to talk with EMR, EHR and other patient systems, instant messaging, patient reminders, workflow management, reminders and to-dos, ezReferral is an intelligent system.
“Dr. Vincent’s entry—ezReferral— is an example of the immense possibilities of physician-led innovation— when a physician identifies a gap in treatment or in a system, and takes it upon his or her self to solve it,” says Lindee David, CEO of Joule.
“Joule is thrilled to have awarded Dr. Vincent with a $50K Joule Innovation grant. ezReferral met all the requirements—it is scalable across Canada and beyond; it has potential to transform existing health care practices; it is relevant to Joule’s mandate and physicians—and perhaps most importantly, it has the ability to improve people’s lives.”
Dr. Vincent sees this as only the beginning of the revolution of healthcare innovation and patient engagement. “We are committed to the future today,” Vincent states.