Pathway start date in the NHS e-Referral Service

The pathway start date is the date recorded in e-RS to indicate when a patient's referral pathway began.

It is intended to support referral management, monitor patient pathways, and operational processes throughout the patient's journey.

Referrals

The pathway start date is recorded against a referral when one of the following events first occurs.

When a referral is:

• booked into a Directly Bookable Service (DBS) - for example, an Urgent Suspected Cancer service that is not a Single Point of Access (SPoA) service
• booked into an interface or referral management service, and if then subsequently referred onto an elective SPoA service, it will still be the first booking that starts the RTT clock
• deferred into a DBS, resulting in an Appointment Slot Issue (ASI)
• sent to a Referral Assessment Service (RAS), or an elective SPoA service, where a referral letter is already associated with the referral
• created by an integrated system that supplies the pathway start date to e-RS

Advice and guidance (A&G) requests

When an A&G request is converted, the pathway start date is recorded as follows, for:

• provider conversions, the pathway start date is the date on which the advice conversation was first submitted to the provider
• referrer conversions, the pathway start date is the date the conversion takes place