How can smarter referral management take your practice to the next level?

Physicians often rely on referrals for new patient flow through their practice. Unfortunately, most doctors network incorrectly, inconsistently and ineffectively.

• Half of all referrals made do not end with an actual doctor’s visit
• Less than 35% of specialty practices report receiving a referred patient’s history
• Nearly 20-30% of medical errors are caused by breakdowns in the referral process

Having a technology-oriented approach towards building and maintaining a healthy referral network could be the key to resolving these problems and, in turn, ensuring a practice’s success.

Making a better referral management system

Healthcare practices need to be more conscientious of creating referral programs that patients would be willing to use. For the referred physician to respond, the patient information should be readily available and actionable. There are multiple needs for healthcare professionals that a referral management system needs to fulfill.

• Make the referral process simple:
  Provide simple referral forms to your staff or to the referred patients to fill out during a visit. Details about their health condition, the source of referral and their contact information are probably the only details you would need for your initial interaction with patients. Collecting details about their health helps you plan their next appointment and consultation, ensuring they follow-up with you.
• Focus on delivering better quality care for patients, faster:
  Send messages to patients according to their communication preferences (e.g. telephone, email, or text message). These messages can include appointment reminders, pre-appointment paperwork, driving instructions, and follow-up messages.
• Reduce network leakage with better visibility of providers across the network:
  Intelligently direct patients to affiliated, in-network, high-quality providers with every care transition. Secure access to clinical summaries, coordinate authorization of service, engage patients before they choose a provider by displaying patient-specific real-time outcomes data for in and out-of-network providers.
• Increase revenue from referring providers:
  For every care transition, discharge patients to the best available continuing care provider, securely transmit clinical summaries and updates to in and out-of-network care providers, generate compliant patient choice lists, and send/receive automated real-time notifications on patient status, appointment times.
• Make use of the latest technologies:
  Modern technology governs each and every aspect of our lives and healthcare should not be an exception. Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are integrated into healthcare so that it brings more tangible results both for the practice and the patients. AI can be used in so many ways to help a practice gain competitive advantages – from AI-assisted operations to analyzing patients’ data in order to shape your next marketing strategy. Make sure to point out to your prospective patients that innovation is part of your practice and that new technologies are implemented in every step so that you can provide consistent and high-quality treatment.

Innovaccer’s Referral Management System

A smarter referral management system helps achieve improved outcomes by ensuring care stays within preferred networks. With superior referral workflows, e-consults, preferred provider registries, and curated dashboards, Innovaccer provides the technology needed to reduce network leakage and much more.

• Schedule appointments based on a patient’s availability and ensure they are prepared for their upcoming specialist visits.
• Allow patients to book appointments themselves, ensure adherence to appointments with automated text and voice updates, as well as PHI-secured reminders.
   

  

• Receive and process new referrals digitally and through eFax.
• Leverage automatic routing of referrals based on predefined business rules.

  

• Send referrals to specialists directly from point-of-care or through a centralized referral system.
• Improve efficiency by automatically running optical character recognition to pre-fill referral forms and enabling real-time patient insurance eligibility checks.
• Integrate prior authorization approval functionality within workflows for seamless appointment booking.

• Leverage e-consults from RubiconMD to avoid costly specialist visits and improve patient satisfaction by enabling rapid bi-directional informational flow with specialists.

The solution offers over a 30% reduction in network leakage and a 20-30% improvement in appointment adherence.

To find out more about Innovaccer’s referral management system click here.

Book a demo to learn how Innovaccer can enhance your practice!