Electronic medical referral system: Decision support and recommendation approach

In the medical practice in countries like Canada, it is common that a general practitioner (GP) refers a patient to a specialist (SP) to complete the patients´ medical treatment. This patients´ transfer is termed medical referral process. Recently, many researchers have been focussing on reducing the wait time spent on the medical referrals which is mainly caused by the long time spent in finding the proper SP. In this paper, we describe a framework that involves a fully implemented and running web-based electronic referral system, including a standard referral form, to enhance the process of identifying the proper specialists using decision support and recommendation techniques. The outcome is promising and demonstrates the power of automated intelligent systems in serving the health care domain.