The Ministry of Health (MOH) has referred 109892 patients through the Referral (Ehalati) Program, including 2325 life-saving cases during the first half of the year 1436H.
Meanwhile, MOH underlined that the program aims at unifying the adopted measures on patient referral among health facilities at all levels throughout the Kingdom’s regions, as well as referring the patient automatically between the levels of the medical service in a record time based only on the patient's health situation and the objective medical opinion.
It's worth mentioning here that the advantages of ‘Ehalati’ Program are numerous; including providing medical counseling among the physicians in the various medical facilities, to study the patient case without the need for transferring him. It also provides all the logistic and coordination requirements to refer the patient from one medical facility to another. In addition, it provides an archiving and statistical system, which contains information of the referred patients in the Kingdom’s hospitals.
From his part, the Director of the Referral (Ehalati) Program, Mr. Suleiman bin Ahmad Al-Sharie‘, explained that the program follows up the movement of the approvals and referred cases entered into the system of ‘Ehalati’ Program through the program's competent employee in the Medical Coordination and Follow-up Centers at the Program's administration and the health affairs directorates in the provinces and regions. He said that the Program has proven able to achieve the desired objective; as 95218 cases were approved immediately in the health facilities (at a rate of 86.6% of all referred cases through the system), whereas 2358 cases (about 2.1%) are still being considered, and 11,537 cases (10.5% of all referred cases) are not in need to be referred, as the required service, after consulting the competent medical committee, was proven available in the referring hospital. That is to be added, he said, to 779 cases (0.7% of all referred cases) still on the waiting list.