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By Josh Hall | @Vancan19

health quality council investigating

AHS ‘deeply sorry’ after audit finds around 14,000 referrals were delayed

Oct 5, 2024 | 7:12 AM

Alberta Health and Alberta Health Service are admitting that a processing disruption delayed medical referrals last month.

According to the Government of Alberta, it was in late September when AHS notified them that there was an issue affecting patient referrals to community specialists from AHS’ new electronic health record, Connect Care.

An internal AHS audit revealed that some referrals to specialists outside AHS were not being processed.

Approximately 14,000 patients may have been affected, with 31 patients identified as needing immediate follow-up. Those 31, says the province, may have experienced a potential negative outcome due to this delay.

Unsent referrals total about 741 in Central Zone, 549 in North Zone, 10,025 in Edmonton Zone, 3,329 in Calgary Zone, and 268 in South Zone.

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“Timely access to care at critical times is a priority. This issue is greatly concerning, and we are committed to taking swift action to ensure AHS addresses and prioritizes the issue,” says Health Minister Adriana LaGrange.

“I’ve asked the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) to investigate, and I look forward to recommendations brought forward as a result of the third-party review.”

Meantime, AHS has begun to notify patients, who can access the status of their referrals through MyHealth records.

AHS is also expressing its regret over the delays.

“AHS is dedicated to providing Albertans with the high-quality care they need, when they need it, and we are deeply sorry that some patients did not receive that in a timely way,” said Athana Mentzelopoulos, President and CEO, AHS.

“We welcome this third-party review and look forward to working closely with HQCA to ensure that our systems have robust safeguards in place that will prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

AHS notes that typically, specialists outside of its scope have their own medical record systems which don’t allow referrals to easily flow from Connect Care to their systems directly.

On average, AHS issues close to 100,000 referrals annually.

AHS adds that it has implemented several measures to prevent this issue from happening again, including increasing training for processing patient referrals, improved auditing to mitigate future challenges, and improving electronic delivery of outgoing referrals.

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