Alberta Health Service says they are looking into patients across the province who may have been impacted by delayed referrals to healthcare providers.
"An internal AHS audit completed in late September revealed that some patient referrals to external healthcare providers in Central Zone were not properly processed. In some cases, this has caused a delay in care," says an AHS news release.
However, it was also found that patients in all five AHS zones including Central, North, Edmonton, Calgary, and South may also be impacted.
According to the Alberta government, around 14,000 patients may have been affected by the outgoing referrals.
The province says 3,329 unsent referrals to community providers were accounted for in the Calgary Zone.
That zone includes Strathmore and Chestermere.
According to AHS, the organization's clinical teams are working to assess every delayed referral to figure out the impacts on each patient and schedule them as quickly as possible.
"AHS will directly contact every patient where the potential for adverse clinical impact has occurred. Patients will be provided with the opportunity to address any questions and concerns they might have," the release mentioned.
The potentially affected patients are a small number of the total referrals being assessed.
"This issue applies to referrals from AHS to healthcare providers who are outside of AHS and not Connect Care users, such as specialty clinics and allied health professions," AHS noted.
AHS issues around 100,000 referrals a year.
"These providers operate in partnership with AHS but work in a community setting, and typically have their own electronic medical record system that does not allow for referrals to easily flow from Connect Care to their systems directly," added AHS staff.
The company says they will work to improve auditing to prevent issues like this one from happening again and increase training for processing patient referrals.
A third-party review is being looked into by the Health Quality Council of Alberta.