The big news this week came out of the west, where WA Health has finally gone to tender for a new electronic referral solution to replace the SharePoint system it has used for many years. WA Health has a centralised referrals processing system for its metropolitan hospitals and SharePoint would have done the job in the past, but newer technology has fast overtaken it.

WA Health says just over a quarter of referrals to its public hospitals are done by secure messaging and it appears faxes and letters rein supreme otherwise. It would be a surprise if the situation is any different between GPs and private specialists. There’s a lot of easily available, cheap and very good secure messaging technology out there, so it appears that the referrals management system (RMS) will be central to this project. WA Health is looking for a new RMS that also has to integrate with webPAS and its internal eReferrals system. That’s where a lot of the complexity of eReferrals comes to the fore.