What NHS Teams Get Right (and Wrong) About Referral Management

By Dominic Markham, Cinapsis

I spend most of my week talking to people who live and breathe NHS delivery - Programme Managers, Clinicians, Ops leads, ICB teams. Everyone wants the same thing: to move patients through the system faster, more safely, and with less friction.

Referral management sits right at the heart of that ambition. Done well, it can unlock huge gains for capacity and experience. Done badly, it just adds another layer of administration. The difference between the two usually comes down to one thing: how well the system reflects clinical behaviour.

That’s what we’ve been helping teams to achieve.

It’s not about control - it’s about clarity

There’s sometimes a misconception that referral management is about gatekeeping. It isn’t. The best systems don’t block referrals, they improve the quality of them.

When clinicians can access specialist input early, they make more confident, accurate decisions. That leads to faster resolution, fewer handoffs, and better outcomes for everyone. In many of the deployments I’ve supported, you can see that confidence build within weeks: referrals become faster, more precise, and communication more focused.

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The right infrastructure changes everything

The NHS already has the intent. What’s been missing is the infrastructure.

Many teams are still trying to manage collaboration through eRS, a system designed for sending forms, not for real-time clinical discussion. That’s why we built Cinapsis differently. It supports multi-channel communication - whether that’s a quick call, a structured form, a virtual consultation, or a clinical questionnaire - and even integrates directly with eRS so that all cases can be pulled in, discussed, and managed in one place.Clinicians can securely share images, see a patient’s clinical history in real time, and close the loop without ever losing traceability or governance.

When clinicians can connect in whatever way suits the case, everything improves: communication becomes fluid, pathways become faster, and governance is never compromised.

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Data that drives action, not just dashboards

Referral data is only valuable if it helps teams adapt. With Cinapsis, every exchange generates insight: which pathways need capacity, which advice requests prevent escalation, where new clinical education could have the biggest impact.

We talk a lot about digital transformation, but what it really comes down to is giving clinicians better tools to do what they already want to do, deliver the right care, first time.

Referral management shouldn’t be about process; it should be about precision. When systems give clinicians visibility and speed, the backlog starts to take care of itself.

That’s what we’re passionate about at Cinapsis: helping NHS teams move from managing referrals to mastering flow.

Want to see how Cinapsis is helping systems make referral management work in practice? Get in touch with our team.

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