Process family

Patient journey: six templates from referral to discharge planning

The patient's path through care as six linked flowcharts: patient referral, intake, prior authorization, the telehealth visit, medication reconciliation and discharge planning, each keeping clinical judgement with a qualified clinician.

The patient journey is the sequence of handoffs from a referral to a discharge plan: the referral accepted by a qualified receiver, intake, the payer's authorisation, the encounter, the medication list reconciled, and a discharge whose follow-up has a named owner. This family orders six templates in that sequence; each keeps clinical decisions away from administrative roles and names the next owner.

The referral process opens the chain with a direct clinician-to-clinician route for urgent concerns, the referring clinician keeping ownership until a qualified receiver accepts, and a receipt-confirmation loop for referrals that go missing. Intake handles identity and administrative completeness, keeps symptom interpretation out of administrative roles through two safety checkpoints, and ends when the intake summary reaches the receiving care team. Prior authorization runs alongside with an early cannot-wait branch for time-critical care, loops that return payer questions to the correct clinician, and approval, denial and appeal routes that leave everyone holding the same documented outcome.

The encounter drawn here is the telehealth visit: consent and location checks before the link is sent, a suitability decision made by qualified review rather than a symptom rule, and the clinician's decision whether in-person evaluation is needed. At any transition, medication reconciliation builds a best possible medication history, keeps clinical-judgement decisions with qualified staff, and confirms the next owner received the list. Discharge planning identifies complex needs early, escalates unresolved barriers instead of treating the planned date as approval, and gates on medication review, teach-back and the receiving provider's acceptance before a plan with confirmed follow-up ownership.

Several steps a patient experiences have no template of their own. Scheduling is folded into referral and intake; the in-person visit and inpatient admission are not drawn, so the telehealth workflow stands in for the encounter; the post-discharge follow-up call exists only as ownership assigned inside discharge planning; and billing and claims are absent entirely. The events that interrupt the journey, an adverse event, a privacy breach, a device complaint, are the healthcare safety and compliance family, and both sit under healthcare.