Riverbank runs six clinics that accept referrals by fax, secure email, post and an online form nobody had touched since 2015. Reception staff rekeyed every one into the patient system by hand. An audit found that 19 per cent of referrals were either duplicated across channels or sat unacknowledged for more than ten days, and no single person could see the queue from end to end.
Clinical safety set the constraint: nothing could be automated that a clinician would not be able to review and reverse. So we built triage as an assistive queue rather than an autonomous one. Referrals are normalised, deduplicated and ranked, and a named triage nurse accepts or overrides each ranking. The system explains why it called something urgent, which turned out to matter more than raw accuracy.
Rekeying disappeared, and with it most of the transcription errors. Median time to acknowledgement fell from nine days to under one. The clinics kept the same intake staff but moved two of them onto patient follow-up, which is the change the partnership had wanted for three years and never had the hours to make. The queue is now reviewed in a weekly meeting that takes eleven minutes.