Daniel, Newman, M.D.The eReferral management system implementation started with the department of medicine at BMC and became so popular that other surgical specialties and departments began clamoring for the system. The eReferral system was then rolled out across other hospital specialties and the 12 affiliated health centers over the course of a year.BMC has seen many improvements from its eReferral system including increasing scheduled referrals from 30 percent to 60 to 80 percent and reducing no-shows by 2 percent to 23 percent. Also, turnaround time for patients has markedly improved from an average of about 33 days to get a specialist appointment to now six to eight days.When first released, the new system received some negative flak for changing workflows. “One of the challenges at the health centers was the concern about how much can we trust this new fangled method,” says Newman. “They were very content with their horrible method, and they were worried it was going to get worse and not better. From the administrator side of things, they were worried that this would increase the amount of staff they would need to monitor the referrals.”It took a year, says Newman, for people to appreciate the new efficiencies and be able to monitor in real-time how many referrals are put in the system and how many are made. Next steps are to implement the eReferral system for the BMC primary care physicians, deploy the system between BMC departments, and offer the system via the BMC website for use by non-network, referring providers.