Leverage a Physician Referral Service to Improve your Referral Process and Revenue

More and more practices are looking to a physician referral service to improve the referral process and capture more revenue. A study of 105 million referrals by the Archives of Internal Medicine found that only about half resulted in a visit to the specialist. This means roughly 50% of the time, patients fail to receive the care they need, and specialists do not capture the most revenue. The reasons for this are several as the patient referral and follow up process is complex.

For most practices, determining which specialists work with a patient’s insurance and considering patient preferences around location and availability is a manual, time-consuming process. One study showed that less than 50% of adult inpatient care remained within a health system, leading to network leakage, while another study found one-third of patients are lost. While some leakage is to be expected due to lack of clinical specialties, location, patient preference, capacity restrictions, or narrow network availability, most of it can be avoided by use of an online, referral system.