Transfer Center Guidance

Transfer Center Calls:

Patient transfers from outside hospitals are directed through the Patient Logistics Center (PLC), and can be reached at 984-974-4500. The Medicine Access Physician (MAP) pager 123-6955 will be paged for General Medicine and Hospital Medicine transfer requests 24 hours a day.

  • The MAP team will cover the pager seven days a week, 7 AM to 7 PM.
  • The Division of Hospital Medicine will cover the pager 7 PM to 7 AM From 7 PM until 9 PM, the HBR 2nd shift physician is responsible for covering the pager. From 9 PM until 7 AM, the HBR Night physician is responsible for covering the pager.

For patients accepted overnight, the MAP team will coordinate the next morning with the MAO and PLC to triage patients on the wait list and bring them in to the right bed, to the right team at the right time.

General guidelines:

  • When responsible for the MAP pager, please return calls in a prompt manner. Unanswered pages will be escalated per protocol – 2 pages 20 minutes apart not returned will be escalated up through division and department leadership.
  • When the ED is on diversion, you may receive a transfer request from an outside hospital ED. You should ask the PLC representative on the call if there are any medicine beds available or if there is a wait list. If we have no bed or provider capacity, you may decline to connect with the sending hospital (request that the PLC ask the sending provider to call back the following day). Treat these transfer requests the same as any other request, deciding if a patient would benefit from transfer, but also making sure the sending physician is aware of a likely delay in transfer from that outside hospital ED (especially when there are few medicine beds available or a long medicine wait list).
  • It may be appropriate at times to transfer a patient from an outside ED as observation status (rather than as an inpatient) depending on the patient’s presenting complaint. If so, we may be able to target an open bed in the observation unit.
  • When a patient’s primary reason for transfer is not medical in nature but another service is asking medicine to accept the transfer, please discuss the reasons with the attending of the other service prior to acceptance.
  • Suggesting transfer with medical consultation may be appropriate.
  • Remember that all calls are recorded.
  • Patients should be accepted to the same level of care they are currently receiving (Acute, Stepdown, ICU). Calls for patients receiving ICU level care should be directed to the MICU team.
  • You can accept the patient to MDU (if appropriate as a teaching case) or MDH (if appropriate for hospitalist service).
  • You must leave a telephone message in EPIC. Without this note, critical information will be lost. Please use the dot phrase .NOTETRANSFERREQUEST.
  • Discuss possible back transfer and requirement for imaging, documentation at time of acceptance.