Note: The intended audience of this support article is health information trustees/custodians. Non-trustee/custodian entities that are involved in referral management (e.g., a Regional Authority or Central Intake) should refer to their respective jurisdiction's legislation to determine their level of responsibility in ensuring that clinical information is stored in an appropriate system of record.
Since Ocean is not an EMR/EHR and not a long term repository of health information for a patient, it is important to ensure that relevant clinical information is stored appropriately in a system of record (e.g., an EMR/EHR). This transfer of information should be reasonably timely and occur before the information is purged from Ocean.
This is most often acheived through an integration between the Ocean Site and the EMR/EHR. However, in the case that an Ocean Site is not integrated with an EMR/EHR, Ocean does support the ability to export a backup of all received referrals and their associated information. This can be done by following the steps below:
- Log in to the Ocean Portal and navigate to the 'eReferrals & eConsults' area.
- Expand the Actions menu at the bottom left. Then select "Export".
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Select your start and end date for your export. You can download data within a specific date range, based on the referral's modification date. Or, you can pull all data since you started receiving referrals by leaving both dates blank.
Note: If your specified date range exceeds 31 days and includes more than 500 referrals, you will be prompted to specify a date range of 31 days or less.
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Select “Export unexported referrals only” if you would only like to export referrals that have not been previously backed up. If you want to export all referrals in the Ocean Portal, uncheck this box.
Note: Ensure this checkbox is enabled if you are exporting more than 500 referrals.
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Select “Mark referrals exported” to mark the referrals as backed up once you've completed the export. This will add a green checkbox icon beside the referral in the Ocean portal, once the export is completed. If this box is left unchecked, the next time the export is done, the previously exported referrals will be pulled once again.
Note: Ensure this checkbox is enabled if you are exporting more than 500 referrals.
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Finally, click "Export". This will export your data in a .csv file that can be opened using Microsoft Excel.
Note: If you are exporting more than 500 referrals, continue to click the 'Export' button to download multiple .csv file batches until a completion alert is shown.
Final Comments
The referral export file(s) will contain patient health information and should be stored somewhere securely at your site.
Any time a user presses the 'Export' button, an audit log entry (EXPORTED_REFERRALS) is automatically generated documenting the date, time, and user that performed the export.
Referral information pulled in the export includes; referral reference, patient name, description, status, referral date, booked date (if present), referring site, recipient site, clinician, professional ID, patient phone number, patient email, internal comments, referrer comments, and the entire contents of the referral note.
The API also provides access to this referral information. For more details, please refer to: "Ocean Open API".