The roll out of the HealthPathways Provider Directory pilot next month is the first stage of providing regional HealthPathways teams with more hands-on control of their request/referral pages.

In a recent video, Ian Anderson (CEO, Streamliners) described the directory as a new tool in the HealthPathways suite which will enable HealthPathways teams to update specialist listings from their own sources – cutting out the need to send maintenance requests to a technical writer. Future phases could also see the HealthPathways Provider Directory syncing with other provider databases.

“The Provider Directory represents a major upgrade to the tools HealthPathways teams use to coordinate and maintain their local information,” Project Manager Matt Sinclair says.

“Not only will coordinators be looking at greater efficiency on a day-to-day basis, but they’ll also be able to respond to urgent listing updates on a same day basis. For a lot of teams, it could be a bit of a game-changer.”

Within the new Provider Directory, HealthPathways regions can store all the provider information needed for a specific referral listing, including physical addresses, contact information (referral and e-referral details), specialties, urgencies, and even methods of funding. 

As usual, the technical writing team will build and format the request/referral pages, but once the pages are live, all service and specialist information can be directly updated in one action by a regional HealthPathways team member.

“The directory will publish provider information from a central location into any request/referral page during the publishing process, with the layout and level of detail defined by the work of the technical writer and built-in templates,” Matt says.

“This is great news for regions that have wanted to include details that the National Health Service Directory (NHSD) currently can’t accommodate. ”

From November this year, Streamliners will begin piloting the HealthPathways Provider Directory with the HealthPathways teams in Hunter New England and Western Australia. The project is aiming to make it available to the remaining HealthPathways regions by April 2016.

Future phases of the project will enable basic provider data to be obtained from sources which HealthPathways may already be linking to, such as the NHSD and e-referral databases. A HealthPathways team will then be able to add additional details to this data before it’s uploaded to their HealthPathways website.

“And this is all at the fingertips of regional HealthPathways teams. All the information on services and people will be maintained locally, while the Technical Writing team takes care of the initial publishing of the pages.”

For more information, see the:

• HealthPathways Provider Directory Overview.
• HealthPathways Provider Directory FAQs.