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Specialist Referral Letter to GP Drafter

Example prompt: "When I save a clinical note to our 'Referrals' Drive folder, draft a structured GP referral letter using our standard template, save it back to the same folder, and post a link in #clinical on Slack so the clinician can sign off before it goes anywhere near the GP's inbox."

The Problem

A private specialist who takes GP referrals — a private GP, a consultant in any specialty, a senior physiotherapist, a mental health practitioner, a sports physician — is expected to write back to the referring GP within five to ten working days of seeing the patient. The letter is not optional: the GP needs the note for the patient's record, the referral relationship depends on it, and the patient often won't get the next bit of NHS care without it. Writing the letter from scratch after each clinic costs the clinician thirty to sixty minutes per patient — most of that time spent on structure rather than clinical judgement. By the end of a busy clinic the letters are stacked up, the clinician writes them at home on Saturday, the quality drifts, and the worst ones don't get written at all.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow on the practice's existing 'Visits' sheet. When the clinician marks a visit as 'Letter Due', the workflow reads the clinical note (a Google Doc the clinician has already written or dictated) and an LLM step assembles a structured letter back to the referring GP in our standard format — re block, date seen, reason for referral, history, examination, working diagnosis, plan, follow-up, signed sign-off. The letter is saved as a Google Doc in a 'Referral Letters Awaiting Sign-off' folder and the clinician gets a Gmail draft asking them to review, edit, and move the doc to 'Referral Letters Signed' when done. The workflow watches that folder and, on sign-off, drafts a Gmail to the referring GP with the letter attached as a PDF; reception or the clinician sends. The daily 8am Slack queue shows what is drafted, what is signed, and what has been stuck for more than ten working days. The workflow never invents clinical detail, never auto-sends, and never makes a clinical decision — it owns the structure and the routing, the clinician owns the content. Glass Box preview shows the drafted letter, the Gmail to the GP, and the Slack queue before anything is sent.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (integration): A row in the 'Visits' tab has its letter_status column changed to 'Letter Due'.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Look up the patient's first name and date of birth in 'Patients', and the referring GP's full name, practice name, address, and email in 'GP Directory'. Read the clinical note from the Google Doc linked in visit_notes_doc_link.
  3. Step 2 (llm): Generate the structured referral letter into our template — letterhead, re block, date seen, reason, history, examination, impression, plan, follow-up, sign-off. Sections with no content in the notes are marked 'Not discussed at this visit'. No clinical detail is invented.
  4. Step 3 (integration): Save the letter as a Google Doc in the 'Referral Letters Awaiting Sign-off' folder named with the patient_code, visit date, and GP surname. Update letter_status to 'Drafted — awaiting clinician'.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Draft a Gmail to the clinician with the Doc linked and a one-line summary; the clinician reviews, edits, and moves the Doc to 'Referral Letters Signed' when done.
  6. Step 5 (conditional + integration): When a file appears in the 'Referral Letters Signed' folder, look it up against the visit row by filename, draft a Gmail to the referring GP's address with the file attached as a PDF and a brief covering note, and update letter_status to 'Signed — awaiting send'.
  7. Step 6 (integration): When the Gmail draft is sent, update letter_status to 'Sent' and append a row to the 'Letters Log' tab with the visit_id, patient_code, GP code, signed-letter Drive link, sent timestamp, and Gmail thread link.
  8. Step 7 (integration): At 8am each morning, post the daily letter queue in #clinical-letters Slack grouped by clinician: drafted awaiting review, signed awaiting send, and stuck-for-more-than-ten-working-days.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the 'Visits' tab as the trigger and state machine, the 'Patients' tab for first name and DOB, the 'GP Directory' tab for the GP's contact details, the 'Practice Settings' tab for the letterhead and registration number, and the 'Letters Log' tab as the audit log
  • Google Docs — the source visit note (read), and the generated referral letter (written) in a structured template
  • Google Drive — the 'Referral Letters Awaiting Sign-off' and 'Referral Letters Signed' folders, used both as state and as the sign-off mechanism (moving a doc between folders is the signal)
  • Gmail — the clinician's review draft and the GP-facing dispatch draft; both are drafts, neither auto-sends
  • Slack — the daily #clinical-letters queue with three sections (awaiting review, awaiting send, stuck) so the practice can see the pipeline at a glance

Who This Is For

Private specialist practices that accept GP referrals — private GP groups, consultant outpatient clinics across most specialties, senior physiotherapy practices, mental health and psychiatry practices, sports medicine and orthopaedics. Particularly useful where the clinician already records the visit as a structured note (typed or dictated and transcribed) and where the letter has a consistent house structure. This is not a substitute for a clinician's judgement on what to write — it is a structure-and-routing layer that gets the first 80% of the letter onto a page so the clinician's time goes into the clinical content rather than the headings, the address block, and the attachment.

Time & Cost Saved

A clinician writing a referral letter from scratch typically spends 30-60 minutes per visit — much of it on the structural plumbing rather than the clinical thinking. A practice doing fifty referred visits a week is carrying twenty to forty hours of letter-writing as overhead, which is the reason the letters are late and the reason the Saturday catch-up exists. This workflow takes the structure off the clinician's desk — the letter is drafted and routed before they look at it, edits typically take eight to twelve minutes per letter, and the stuck-letter alert means none of them sit in a drawer for a month. Clinicians who have used patterns like this tend to halve the letter-writing time and stop missing the ten-working-day target.

Notes on Auto-Send vs Drafts

The referral letter is a clinical document and never auto-sends. The clinician's sign-off — by moving the Doc to the 'Referral Letters Signed' folder — is the gate; nothing reaches the GP's inbox until that has happened. Even after sign-off, the GP-facing email lands as a Gmail draft so reception or the clinician can attach any additional documents (a copy of an investigation report, a discharge summary) before sending. Auto-send in this category remains limited to the two operational workflows whose messages carry no clinical content: the Appointment Reminder Cadence's three templated reminders and the Telehealth Video Link Dispatch's up-to-four templated link-bearing emails (confirmation, 24-hour reminder, rescheduled, cancellation). A referral letter is in a different class entirely.