A pile of letters in a dozen formats
Referrals come from GP practices, gynaecologists, urologists, other fertility clinics and self-referring patients who attach a letter. Some are neat PDFs from a practice system. Some are scans of a printed letter with a handwritten note. A few still arrive by fax. The medical secretary opens each one, works out who the patient is, whether there is a partner, who referred them and what they are being referred for, and types it into the clinic management system.
Letters about both partners are common, and so are letters with a patient's previous surname or a partner's details buried in the text. It is slow, careful work, and it has to be right.
Why referral intake is stuck in manual mode
- Referrals arrive through several routes, so there is no single queue.
- Every referrer uses a different layout, which rules out simple templates.
- Letters often include both partners, and the system needs two linked records.
- Existing patients are re-referred, and duplicate records are easy to create.
- Attachments such as previous test results need filing against the right person.
Most clinics have tried a generic scanning tool at some point. They usually fail on layout variety and on the two-person nature of fertility referrals.
What manual intake costs
Secretarial time is taken up with typing, and referrals wait in a queue before anyone contacts the patient. Mistyped dates of birth or NHS numbers cause matching problems later. Duplicate records, created because nobody spotted the patient was already registered, take time to merge and can cause confusion.
| Task | Done by hand | With assisted intake |
|---|---|---|
| Collecting letters | Checking email, post and fax separately | One referral queue |
| Reading details | Typed field by field | Extracted into a draft for checking |
| Partner details | Often missed or entered later | Proposed as a linked second record |
| Existing patient check | Manual search | Likely matches shown before saving |
| Attachments | Saved and renamed by hand | Filed against the confirmed patient |
How we build referral intake
- We route every referral source into one queue: the referral mailbox, scanned post, and fax-to-email where you still use it.
- An extraction step reads each letter, including scans, and proposes the patient's details, partner details, referrer, reason for referral and any funding information.
- The proposed details are compared with existing records to show likely matches, so a person decides whether this is a new patient or a returning one.
- The secretary sees the letter beside the draft record, corrects anything that is wrong and confirms. Nothing is saved until they do.
- On confirmation, the record is created or updated in your clinic management system through its API or import route, and the letter and attachments are filed against it.
- A task is created for the next step in your process, such as a welcome pack or a funding check.
Letters that are poor quality, handwritten or unusual are marked for full manual entry rather than half-extracted. The aim is to remove typing, not to remove the check.
What the secretaries notice
The referral queue is in one place. For a typical letter, the secretary reads, corrects a field or two and confirms. Partners are linked from the start. Duplicate records become rare because the match check happens before saving, not after. New patients are contacted sooner because the queue moves faster.
It also becomes possible to answer simple questions that used to need a search: how many referrals arrived this month, from which practices, and how many are still waiting to be registered. That helps when you are planning clinic capacity or talking to local referrers about how referrals reach you.
Is referral intake slowing you down?
- Secretaries retype every referral letter.
- Referrals arrive by email, post and fax.
- Duplicate patient records are found regularly.
- Partner details are added later, or missed.
- New referrals wait in a backlog before being registered.