A referral appears in a queue but no one is acting on it
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
Referral troubleshooting
Epic Referral Stuck in a Workqueue: Workflow Checks
A practical, non-clinical workflow checklist for healthcare teams when a referral appears stuck, aging or not moving to the expected next step.
What this often looks like
Common symptoms
Authorization, scheduling and referral teams are waiting on one another
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
The referral is visible but the next owner is unclear
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
Staff create duplicate tasks because they cannot tell whether the original referral moved forward
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
First checks
Work through these before escalating blindly.
- Name the exact referral task that should happen next
- Identify the current queue or team that owns the work
- Confirm what status, event or handoff is expected to move the referral forward
- Separate authorization delay, missing information, scheduling delay and routing ownership into different problems
- Confirm the approved escalation path for aged referrals rather than creating duplicate work
Ownership questions
- Who owns the referral at this exact stage?
- What tells the next team the referral is ready for them?
- Who owns exceptions when normal routing does not work?
- What aging threshold triggers escalation?
Avoid making the problem worse
Do not use a workaround as the default process.
- Creating a second referral just to make the work visible
- Sending patient details to HelpEpic
- Bypassing internal authorization or scheduling policy
- Treating a configuration or interface failure as a training issue
Security and privacy boundary. Do not send HelpEpic patient names, DOBs, MRNs, insurance identifiers, screenshots, records, passwords, tokens or other confidential information. Access, outages, security incidents, protected configuration changes and patient-specific clinical decisions belong with your organization’s authorized teams.
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