Specialty Care Referral Patterns for the Underserved: A Study of Community Health Centers on the South Side of Chicago

Abstract

Little is known about the primary-specialty care interface for underserved patients. In order better to understand inter-physician communication patterns in urban community health centers (CHCs), we conducted a retrospective chart review of specialty care referrals for patients from four South Side Chicago CHCs. Of the 406 identified referrals, 74% (n=301) were made from CHCs that employed referral coordinators and 64% (n=258) were made to affiliated specialists. Chart documentation of whether or not the patient attended the referred specialty visit was present for 43% (n=176) of referrals, and communication from the specialist to the referring clinician was present for 31% (n=127) of referrals. Employing CHC referral coordinators was positively associated with documented specialty clinical communication (odds ratio [OR] 1.8, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.1-3.2). Use of referral coordinators to facilitate care and integrating delivery systems to increase information sharing appear to improve care coordination, but further investigation is warranted.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.