Referral

A referral is the act of directing a patient to another provider — a specialist, a higher-level facility, or a diagnostic service — for care beyond the current doctor's scope. In India it is common between general practitioners and specialists, and between smaller hospitals and larger tertiary centres for cases that need equipment or expertise a smaller facility doesn't have.

Why it matters in a hospital

A referral that isn't clearly recorded — who the patient was sent to, and why — is easy to lose track of once the patient leaves the building, which makes it hard to follow up on outcomes or answer a family's later questions about what was advised. For the referring hospital, a documented referral also closes the loop on that encounter for its own reporting, rather than leaving the visit's outcome undefined. Over time, a pattern of referrals for a particular condition can also be a useful signal about where the hospital's own capability genuinely ends, informing decisions about what equipment or specialists to invest in next.

How Trisvio handles it

Trisvio records the referral facts it has fields for: an admission can note the doctor who referred the patient in, and a discharge can be recorded as Referred, so a patient sent on to another facility is not counted as a routine discharge. It does not exchange data with the other provider's systems, and the OPD consultation has no separate referral field.