Referral Management Automation
Automating referral intake compresses that window to minutes. Documents are read on arrival, matched to an existing chart or flagged as new, scored for urgency, and routed to the clinic that can actually see the patient.
What breaks today
Referrals arrive in every format
Fax, secure email, direct message, portal upload, and paper. Each channel has a different owner and a different backlog.
Triage is a person reading PDFs
The most experienced coordinator in the practice spends their day deciding which of forty documents is urgent.
No first-contact SLA
Nobody can say how long it takes from referral receipt to patient contact, because the clock is never started.
Incomplete referrals stall silently
A referral missing insurance or a required note gets set aside and forgotten rather than sent back for completion.
What we build
Scoped during the assessment, then delivered in one to three week increments against your real systems.
Unified referral intake
Fax, email, Direct, and portal channels feed a single queue with the source preserved for reporting.
Classification and extraction
Referring provider, reason, requested specialty, urgency indicators, and insurance are extracted into structured fields.
Patient matching and chart creation
Existing patients are matched deterministically. New patients are staged for creation with the referral already attached.
Routing rules by specialty and geography
Referrals route to the location and provider with capacity, honoring the rules your access team already applies by hand.
First-contact clock and escalation
A timer starts at receipt. Referrals not contacted within your SLA escalate to a supervisor with the reason for delay.
What changes
Ranges reflect what comparable engagements have produced. Your baseline is measured during the assessment before anyone commits to a number.
- Time from referral receipt to first patient contact reduced from days to hours
- Referral leakage reduced by closing the weekend and after-hours gap
- Incomplete referrals returned to the sender the same day
- Referral volume by source reported accurately for network development
Systems this touches
Integration channel is chosen on verified capability in your environment, not on what is easiest to document.
- Epic
- Oracle Health (Cerner)
- athenahealth
- NextGen
- Direct Secure Messaging
- eFax and Documo
- HL7 v2 REF
Not sure this is the right workflow to start with? The $24,997 assessment exists to answer exactly that, and it frequently points somewhere other than where leadership expected.
Common Questions
Can the system decide clinical urgency?
It flags urgency indicators present in the referral text and applies your written triage rules. It does not exercise clinical judgment. Anything ambiguous goes to a clinical reviewer with the document attached.
What if our referral sources will not stop faxing?
They will not, and that is fine. Fax is a first-class channel in every referral build we deliver. The goal is to make the fax queue behave like a structured data source, not to eliminate it.
Talk it through with an engineer.
Tell us what this workflow costs you today and we will tell you honestly whether automating it is worth the engagement.
Start with a conversation, not a proposal.
A 45-minute call with a senior engineer. We will tell you honestly whether automation is the right answer for the workflow you have in mind.