Referral leakage is a major issue in today’s healthcare industry. Losing referrals on their way to you can lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue, depending on the size of your enterprise, which can damage your organization’s financial health.
Fortunately, there is a range of dedicated patient referral management platforms that now help healthcare organizations keep track of their referrals to ensure they’re not bleeding money. These solutions organize the intake process and automate tedious workflows. They also make sure that the communication loop between specialists and primary care is rock-solid so no patients fall through the cracks.
As you might imagine, competition in this particular niche is fierce. There are all sorts of platforms, so which ones do we recommend? Fortunately, that’s where this review comes into the picture. We run through various patient referral management solutions available on the market today, tell you who they’re best for, and then wrap up with our overall winner.
Best for tracking every referral from order to scheduled appointment – Leading Reach
If you’re the sort of enterprise that hates the idea of anybody falling through the cracks, then take a look at Leading Reach. This platform is a powerful patient referral management solution that connects over 125,000 verified providers across 60,000+ care settings already.
Compared to regular point solutions that digitize the facts, Leading Reach tracks every referral from order to scheduled appointment across the full provider network, giving healthcare organizations more visibility into referral status. Practices can track metrics like leakage and scheduling velocity to see where improvements can be made and where issues are occurring.
Leading Reach already processes more than 25,000+ referrals every day across 30,000 organizations. Its internal metrics suggest that it’s able to achieve return on investment in under 90 days without additional staff burden, making it one of the most compelling offers on the market right now.
Best for HIPAA compliant task management – Dock Health
If you’re looking for HIPAA-compliant task management, Dock Health could be a great option. Healthcare providers looking to reduce the friction of daily administrative work set up this firm. Because it’s foundationally HIPAA compliant, the risks of using this particular software are significantly lower, and it’s able to leverage cloud systems to sync processes across your entire care team.
It doesn’t just track patient status. Dock Health turns the referral process into various actionable and trackable tasks. For example, you get pre-built workflow templates that allow clinics to instantly deploy processes for intake and scheduling. There’s also a central authorisation hub, which is useful for emails, faxes, and form integrations that can securely import patient demographic data.
We think this particular option stands out because the software can automatically trigger a checklist of tasks. This reduces communication issues between human staff and allows for more efficient handoffs.
Best for AI-driven inbound workflow automation – Honey Health
What about systems using the latest technology? If you’re after an AI-driven solution, check out Honey Health.
Instead of giving front desk staff better dashboards to organize their work, Honey Health actually does the job of referral management itself. The AI agent is optimized for assisting practices dealing with high volumes of inbound referrals, with the artificial intelligence processing information from end to end. Agent-based browser automation is one of the most impressive elements. You can use it to interact with EHRs and payer tools like a human would. Smart document mining is also a novelty. It pulls clinical and demographic data from incoming faxes and portal messages.
Why does this option stand out to us? Honey Health is a solution you should consider if you want an AI worker that can literally interact with your existing electronic health records in a compliant manner. You can also set it up to automatically perform all sorts of other tasks and give it long-range goals that it understands.
Best for closed-loop referral tracking – Treatspace
The idea of Treatspace is to close the referral loop 100% of the time. This is why the solution emphasizes connectivity between primary care providers and specialists. It’s able to perform automated follow-up tracking that monitors patients at every step to ensure that they book and attend their appointments.
It also has built-in support for practices that use value-based care contracts. Ultimately, it stands out because it standardizes regional workflows and gives organizations a way to measure referral networks. Because it has a continuous stream of service-level data, practices can see the specialists who are providing timely care and return reports to them.
Best for post-acute care transitions – Aidin
What if your organization is regularly involved in handing off patients from acute care to outpatient services or convalescent homes? In these cases, it’s vital that managers and hospital systems moving patients to skilled nursing facilities have the solutions they require.
One thing we like about Aidin is that it offers an open-market provider directory that connects case managers to post-acute care providers. It also has care contingent payment management, which holds receiving operators more accountable for their performance.
Ultimately, Aidin stands out because it deals with hospitals challenged by excessive lengths of stay. It’s able to forge connections with other, more suitable providers to free up beds and enable more operational efficiency.
Best for patient scheduling – Luma Health
Finally, you might want to consider Luma Health if your organization is interested in superior patient scheduling. This solution is built on the philosophy that referrals are only useful if patients actually show up. Luma Health bridges the gap between the referral itself and the patient’s calendar, making sure that they turn up to appointments that generate income. It has omnichannel outreach that uses text messaging, self-scheduling links, digital intake reminders, and deep EHR integrations.
Final verdict
This review covered many of the best patient referral management platforms on the market today, but which one do we think is the best? Ultimately, our choice has to go to Leading Reach, not only because it’s already being used extensively by many providers, but also because it’s able to track every referral from order to scheduled appointment.
