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Case study 04 · Public sector · Healthcare
NHS Connect.
Getting the right referral to the right team, before the 18-week clock runs out.
Case study 04 · Public sector · Healthcare
Getting the right referral to the right team, before the 18-week clock runs out.
The Trust runs outpatient services across several hospital sites and more than a dozen specialties. Referrals arrive by post, fax, email, phone and the NHS e-Referral Service. Letters are often incomplete, staff re-key the same data into several systems, and a suspected cancer referral can sit in a pile like any other.
Patients can't see where they are on the waiting list, so they call the admin team and PALS. Managers find out about 18-week breaches after the fact, from spreadsheets. And patients who don't attend waste clinic slots that someone else has been waiting months for.
The ask: prove in one week, with no real patient data, that a better referral pathway is worth a Trust-wide investment.
Triage reads the referral text for predefined indicators and recommends a priority and team. Every result can be traced to the rule that fired, which a clinical safety officer can actually review.
The tool never diagnoses. It says so on screen, and every recommendation goes to a clinician. Even the referrer's own priority is marked "subject to clinical review".
A banner on every screen, a confirmation box on the form and test-only reference numbers make it hard to put real patient data in by accident.
The patient or GP submits, staff work the queue, managers see performance. Everyone looks at the same referral, so nothing gets re-keyed.
Required fields for specialty, reason, priority, site and contact preference fix the incomplete-letter problem before triage even starts.
18-week RTT breaches and two-week-wait compliance sit at the top of the dashboard, because those are the numbers a Trust board is held to.
The rules lean cautious on purpose. A routine case pushed up for a clinician to check costs a few minutes. A two-week-wait case left in the routine pile can cost far more.
Figures from the MVP's synthetic dataset:
Under the headline numbers it breaks referrals down by specialty and by site, which is where bottlenecks show up first.
We ran it as a cross-functional team: project managers, scrum masters, PMO analysts and business analysts, with everyone taking part in the build. The work behind the screens was the usual delivery kit: as-is and to-be process maps, a backlog of user stories with acceptance criteria, KPI definitions and a RAID log.
As Digital Product and Delivery Manager I sat across what we built and how we delivered it: prioritising the backlog against the one question the Trust cared about, coordinating the team through the week, and leading the final presentation and live demo. Anything that didn't help answer that question got cut.
Building a clickable product within the week put something real in front of stakeholders, so the conversation was about the pathway rather than about slides.
"In healthcare, a triage rule you can't explain is a rule you can't ship. The boring, readable version is the one that gets through governance."