A request is ready but never reaches the expected scheduling team
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
Scheduling delays
Epic Scheduling Handoff Delays: Workflow Triage
A workflow checklist for appointment requests that are delayed between referrals, authorization, scheduling pools and follow-up teams.
What this often looks like
Common symptoms
Scheduling cannot tell whether authorization or referral work is complete
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
Requests bounce between locations or pools
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
Staff recreate scheduling work because status is unclear
Clarify ownership and the expected next handoff before creating more work.
First checks
Work through these before escalating blindly.
- Identify the exact event that should make the request schedulable
- Confirm which team owns the request before and after that event
- Separate referral readiness, authorization readiness and scheduling capacity
- Define the exception route for requests that do not match normal scheduling rules
- Use aging thresholds to escalate instead of duplicating work
Ownership questions
- Who owns the request before it reaches scheduling?
- Who confirms readiness?
- Which pool or location owns the appointment request?
- Who handles unresolved or aging requests?
Avoid making the problem worse
Do not use a workaround as the default process.
- Scheduling around required authorization steps
- Creating duplicate referrals or appointment tasks
- Using HelpEpic for patient-specific urgency decisions
- Changing templates or access configuration without authorization
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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