Unscheduled Referrals and Unattended Appointments After Pediatric Subspecialty Referral.

Objectives: Incomplete subspecialty referrals, whether unscheduled or unattended, represent unmet patient needs and an opportunity to improve patient safety and experiences. Our objectives were to describe the rates of appointment scheduling and visit attendance after pediatric subspecialty referral and to examine patient and systems factors associated with scheduled referrals and attended appointments.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of referrals within a network of 52 primary and urgent care sites from November 2016 to October 2017.