The Scarborough Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease is a specialized gastroenterology clinic in Scarborough, Ontario, focused on the diagnosis and management of inflammatory bowel disease, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
As the practice continued to grow, the team wanted to make it easier for both known and new referring physicians to connect with the clinic. Fax-based referrals had been part of the workflow for years, but more healthcare professionals were adopting digital referral pathways.
SCIBD wanted to be part of that shift.
At the same time, the clinic was looking closely at another high-volume administrative task: appointment confirmations: Reception staff were spending significant time each month calling or manually emailing patients to confirm upcoming visits. Each confirmation required careful attention to appointment dates and times, creating room for manual error and taking staff away from other important work.
The workflow created several pressure points:
SCIBD adopted Ocean to support two practical goals: make referrals easier to receive and manage, and reduce the time staff spent on appointment confirmations.
The clinic selected Ocean eReferrals to create a digital pathway for referring physicians. This helped the clinic support physicians who were already moving away from fax-based workflows and gave new referring providers another way to send referrals.
The clinic also adopted automated appointment confirmations to reduce the need for front desk staff to manually call or email patients. “eReferrals and automatic appointment confirmations—these are game changers," says Victor Orta, SCIBD clinical trial coordinator.
The Ocean-supported workflow
With Ocean eReferrals, SCIBD’s front staff are notified when a new referral comes in. Instead of continuously checking faxes, the team can respond to digital referral activity as it arrives.
Ocean also reduces the manual steps that previously followed each new referral. According to the clinic, there is no need to create new patients manually in the same way, and referral files are scanned automatically into patient files. Referring physicians are also notified when a referral has been accepted, removing another manual communication step from the front desk workflow.
For appointment confirmations, Ocean automates a process that previously required dozens of hours of staff time each month. Instead of manually entering appointment dates and times into emails or calling patients one by one, confirmations are sent automatically.
This changed the day-to-day workflow from a staff-led process to a system-supported one.
SCIBD has noticed improvements across both referral management and patient communication.
The change also helped support the clinic’s growth. Orta noted that the value of Ocean became clear quickly through referrals from physicians the clinic did not previously know.
“The cost of one month of Ocean was paid within the week from referrals by doctors we did not know,” he said.
