IntakeDesk

Referral intake is treated like a mailbox, but it’s actually an operational loop: receive → understand → triage → route → act → confirm. When that loop breaks, staff become the glue, urgency becomes subjective, and the patient experience becomes accidental.

• Inputs are messy and incomplete by default
• “Urgent” hides inside noise
• Every handoff is a chance to lose the patient

IntakeDesk is a clinical operations decision system that extracts structure from unstructured referrals and drives the next action until the referral becomes an appointment—or an explicit, auditable outcome.

• Structured referral record from PDFs/faxes/portals
• Missingness capture (“what we need next”)
• Triage + routing + action execution (schedule / request info / escalate)

The system is designed around closing loops, not collecting documents. It normalizes inputs, applies guardrailed logic, and produces actions with accountability.

• Normalize → extract → classify → route → act → track
• Rules + escalation paths (not black-box guesses)
• Audit trail for why a decision/action happened

In healthcare ops, correctness and clarity beat cleverness. The design favors visible reasoning, safe defaults, and workflows that survive bad data days.

• Tradeoff: fewer “magic” automations, more explainable actions
• Guardrails > raw speed for triage
• Build for staff bandwidth, not ideal inputs

Most intake tooling stops at “received.” IntakeDesk treats intake as an operating system.

• Next-action oriented (not queue oriented)
• Missing info becomes a structured state, not a dead end
• Routing respects real constraints (location, capacity, diagnosis)

The win isn’t a dashboard—it’s throughput and fewer silent failures.

• Shorter time-to-next-step for each referral
• Fewer “lost in the inbox” moments
• Lower cognitive load for coordinators

• Tighter patient/referrer communication loop
• More diagnosis-specific routing + safety playbooks
• Instrumentation to quantify leak reduction and time-to-appointment

I’d still start with the loop, not the UI. The UI gets beautiful once the system closes actions reliably.

• Close the loop first
• Make missingness explicit
• Make outcomes trackable