Maximizing your referral process
By ION
Optimizing your referrals is a core activity – and is valued by all stakeholders in a value-based payment environment.
How can your practice maximize its process? First, assess your current process:
- Gather your team who contribute to the referral process to outline how the process really works, not necessarily how they think it works.
- Reach out to the providers you refer patients to or who refer patients to your practice. Let them know that you are in an assessment process and look for ways to improve communication or coordination of referrals.
- Compare your current process to an ideal process and identify those opportunities for improvement.
- Start with your pain points or most annoying parts of the process to make improvements, all while documenting the changes. Some things to consider should be:
- Process for pre-consultation requests
- Wait time for an appointment with the appropriate clinician
- Clear written summaries for patients
- Process for closing the loop with the primary care provider (if you are the specialist)
Practices may benefit from using InfoDive® to access data for the referral process (and possibly marketing for new patients). With InfoDive, identifying a referring provider is sourced by several different practice management systems with a methodology of looking at NPIs for either internal or external referrals, CPT codes which can identify where a patient was seen for an initial care day (either in a hospital or medical facility-based intake and seen by your provider or elsewhere).
InfoDive also can look at patient demographics to see the top external referring providers, making it easier for your practice to target your marketing efforts.
If you are a current InfoDive user and want more information on how to look at reports for referrals or new patients, contact InfoDiveSupport@intrinsiq.com.
If you would like to view InfoDive’s platforms and features, visit https://www.intrinsiq.com/practice-business-analytics and you can request a full demonstration by emailing InfoDiveSupport@intrinsiq.com.
