Referrals Refresher

Jonathan shares a personal experience regarding a specialist referral, it provides an opportunity to refresh on what referrals are. In this episode Jonathan and Angela refer to the Medical Post, September 2020 issue. Topics span personal experience, referral etiquette, lost referrals, and what is really expected of the patient in the process.

Find Us Online

Angela Hapke - @angelahapke - https://www.clinnect.ca

Jonathan Bowers - @thejonotron - https://www.twostoryrobot.com

Credits

Produced by Jonathan Bowers and Angela Hapke

Music by Andrew Codeman (CC BY 3.0)

Transcript

Angela: [00:00:00] but your, desk moves up and down. Is that an issue?

Jonathan: [00:00:04] But Nope, no, no, it's not because I'm Mount to everything to the desk. Not, not to like to the wall or anything.

Angela: [00:00:11] got it. So it moves with it. Okay, that makes

Jonathan: [00:00:14] Like watch

check this out. this is sometimes how I come into meetings

welcome to the meeting.

Angela: [00:00:25] this is so weird. Your head's just slowly rising up from the bottom of the screen.

Jonathan: [00:00:33] yeah, just appear. I just,

Angela: [00:00:35] Well, you don't, you don't appearance. Like if you were in PowerPoint, it would be the slowest, The slowest, like fly in

Jonathan: [00:00:44] yeah. I fly it from the bottom. Yeah. Real slow.

Intro [00:00:48]

Jonathan: [00:30:23] shout out to Justin Jackson and, John Buddha at Transistor FM.

You're listening to Fixing Faxes, a podcast on the journey of building a digital health startup with your hosts, myself, Angela Hapke.

And I'm Jonathan Bowers. I just got back from taking Zack to an eye specialist, a referral that we had from our GP or family doctor. I'm not sure what the distinction is between a GP and a family doctor.

Angela: [00:01:11] There is a very clear distinction between, GPs and family care providers. But that is a topic for another time.

Getting a Referral to a Specialist [00:01:19]

Jonathan: [00:01:19] Okay. anyways, so, Zach, had a bit of a traumatic birth and suffered some nerve damage to his eyes. And so for the first the many months of his existence his eye didn't open quite correctly and that was concerning. and so we got referred to a specialist. Now the specialist did not let us know that they would much rather us go to a different specialist because that specialist is capable of doing the actual surgery that might be necessary. Didn't phone us, didn't find the GP. So we just phoned them many, many months later asking what's the status of this? And they said, Oh, it needs to go to a different specialist. And so we then had to go back to the GP. The GP, sent the referral to the new specialist and, anyways, it was kind of a pain in the butt. And the only reason why he caught it was because Julie phoned the specialist's office and said, I thought I would have heard from you by now and nothing. Nothing happened. anyways, like medically everything's fine. His vision is perfect. I mean not perfect. It's it's good. he has, he has, what's called a Horner's I'm saying this right Horner's syndrome, which, apparently causes people to sweat differently.

Angela: [00:02:34] Interesting.

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