Refer an Emergency Patient Out With a Packet

Who / when: the ED Physician, when an emergency patient needs care your facility cannot provide and must be sent elsewhere — a higher level of care, a specialist centre, or a different service. ED means Emergency Department; “disposition” is the outcome decision that closes an emergency visit. This guide covers the refer disposition, which sends the patient out with a referral packet.

1. ED Physician — open ED → Disposition. The worklist shows every active emergency visit awaiting a decision. Open the patient you are referring.
2. ED Physician — in the disposition panel, choose “Refer”. The form expands so you can capture where the patient is going and why.
3. ED Physician — record the referral details: the destination (the receiving facility or service) and the clinical reason for transfer, so the team on the other end has the context they need.
4. ED Physician — confirm the disposition. Veona assembles a referral-packet PDF — the document the patient carries to the next facility — and stores it encrypted in Veona Storage (the shared, per-tenant encrypted file vault that every module uses). The packet is linked to the emergency visit, so it can always be retrieved from the patient’s record.
5. ED Physician — open or download the referral packet to print or hand to the transport team. It comes back as a genuine, branded PDF.

Note

The packet is stored encrypted at rest and tied to this emergency encounter — it is never just a loose file. Generating it is signed to you and audited, so there is always a record of who referred the patient, where, and when.

Tip

A formal clinical referral that needs to be eSigned and tracked through to acceptance — rather than an emergency hand-off packet — is a different object. For that workflow, see Create and Notify a Referral.

What happens next

The patient leaves with their referral packet, and the emergency visit is closed with a refer disposition recorded against it. The encrypted PDF stays in the patient’s record for audit and continuity of care. If the patient later returns, their UHID (the permanent VNA-… hospital number) ties this episode to everything that follows.

Follow the trail

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• Related: Admit an Emergency Patient to a Ward · Discharge an Emergency Patient With a Note