Cutting Out the Wait: How EARL Clinic Transformed a Virtual Fracture Pathway
Outpatient clinics and inpatient specialties across all specialties face the same challenges: high referral volumes, long waits, and wasted appointments. In orthopaedics, this takes the form of overloaded fracture clinics. Whatever the setting, the solution is the same: EARL Clinic—a digital referral and triage tool that streamlines pathways, reduces delays, and frees up capacity while keeping patients safer and better informed.
The challenge: delays, bottlenecks, and wasted appointments
Traditionally, Emergency Departments referred almost all suspected fractures into face-to-face clinics. The burden of seeing every patient without differentiation created bottlenecks: patients waited up to 12 days for an outcome, surgical windows were sometimes missed, and consultant-led appointments were wasted on cases that could have been managed virtually. The same story is repeated across other specialties—cardiology, respiratory, gastroenterology—where admin teams juggle paperwork, phone calls, and manual tracking, adding heavy burden to staff and systems.
EARL Clinic: a digital-first referral and triage tool
EARL Clinic introduces a structured, digital referral form that captures the agreed dataset (including imaging, where relevant). Making and triaiging a referral both take less than 30 seconds each. Receiving teams can issue decisions the same day, and keep patients updated automatically by SMS. Outcome letters are automatically generated by EARL Clinic and inserted into the patient record system, eliminating dictation, reducing secretarial workload, and ensuring patients and GP’s are informed without delay. Built-in dashboards and automated reports give managers real-time oversight of referral volumes, outcomes, and service performance—whether the clinic is orthopaedics, cardiology, or beyond.
Case study: West Midlands Virtual Fracture Clinic
A large West Midlands Trust implemented EARL Clinic for its Virtual Fracture Clinic in under 12 weeks—from first meeting to first live referral. The results speak for themselves:
- 28% reduction in face-to-face consultant appointments
- 2,700 appointments freed so far (900 per year / 75 per month)
- £65,000 saving in consultant time alone
- 96% faster outcomes: reduced from 12 days to just 14 hours
- 2 Full-time employees saved in administrative workload
- Improved safety: no missed surgical windows
- Better patient experience: outcomes within 14 hours, with automated patient communication at every step
Clinician voices
“EARL Clinic is absolutely central to how we run the Virtual Fracture Clinic. It allows us to review referrals in real time, discharge around 25% of patients safely without a face-to-face appointment, and keep patients updated instantly by SMS and automatically generated letters. Without EARL Clinic, we would face increased costs, clinic overload, longer delays, and poorer patient experience. It has transformed the service and is now essential to its safe and efficient running.”
— Dr John Blackwell, VFC Lead, Consultant Trauma and Upper Limb Orthopaedic Surgeon
Designed for speed, safety and scale
Although this example is orthopaedics, the impact of EARL Clinic is universal. Clinicians regain valuable time; patients avoid unnecessary appointments & admissions; bottlenecks are unblocked; and managers have access to rich, real-time data. The combination of speed, safety, and transparency makes pathways more resilient and future-proof—whether for fractures, arrhythmias, respiratory flare-ups, or gastroenterology reviews.
From referral to reassurance—in any speciality
EARL Clinic reduces unnecessary outpatient demand, speeds up decision-making, and improves both patient and clinician experience. Orthopaedics is just one example—the same benefits are available to any specialty. Want to see how EARL Clinic could work in your hospital? Book a 30-minute call.