Create and Notify a Referral

Who / when: a Referring Provider (or a desk clerk capturing the referral on a clinician’s behalf), at the moment a patient needs care elsewhere — a specialist clinic, another facility, or a different service. The Receiving Provider comes in at the other end: they are the clinician the referral is addressed to, and they are notified automatically when it is signed. A referral is a clinical document, so creating it and sending it are the same act — the act of signing it with the eSign PIN (a 6-digit signing code, separate from the login password).

We will follow Tunde, a front-desk clerk, capturing a referral that Dr. Adeyemi is sending to a dermatology clinic.

1. Referring Provider (or clerk) — open Appointments → Booking. On step “1 · Booking type”, choose “Referral”. The form rebuilds itself for a referral. (This is the same type-aware form described in Book Appointment, Telehealth or Referral.)
2. Referring Provider (or clerk) — pick the patient by name or UHID (Unique Health ID, the patient’s permanent hospital number). The patient must already be registered; if not, register them first via Register a Patient and Mint a UHID.
3. Referring Provider (or clerk) — fill the referral fields: the urgency (Routine, Urgent, or Emergency), the direction (Outgoing for a patient you are sending out), and the reason / clinical detail for the receiving clinician — what you found and why you are referring.
4. Referring Provider — move to step “4 · Sign & send” and enter the referring clinician’s 6-digit eSign PIN. If a clerk captured the referral, the clinician enters their own PIN here — the signature must be the referring provider’s. (The signature step has its own walk-through in eSign a Referral With Your PIN.)
5. Referring Provider — press “Sign & send referral”. Veona re-checks the PIN, records the referral, and sends it. It now appears on Appointments → Referrals.

Note

Two notifications fire on signing, both content-free — they carry no diagnosis, no clinical detail, only a prompt to log in:

• the Receiving Provider is notified that a referral is waiting for them, and
• the patient gets a “referral received” notice on their chosen channel.

This is by design: Veona never puts protected health information into an outbound email or SMS. The detail lives behind the login.

Caution

If you never reach step 4 and sign, the referral is not created and nobody is notified — an unsigned referral does not exist as far as the receiving provider is concerned. Signing is sending.

What happens next: the referral sits on Appointments → Referrals as Pending until the receiving provider acts on it. When they accept it, Veona turns the referral into a real follow-up appointment on the receiving provider’s schedule — sealing the referral into an actual visit. That step is Accept a Referral Into an Appointment.

Follow the trail

• Next: Accept a Referral Into an Appointment
• Related: Book Appointment, Telehealth or Referral · eSign a Referral With Your PIN