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Transform Your Care Practice With A Streamlined Patient Referral Process

It is imperative to transform your care practice to deliver value-based care. Promoting and exploring technologies for streamlining various processes is the way forward for improved care quality and care coordination. One such process that requires a transformation in care practices is the patient referral process which is still a tedious, fragmented, and time-consuming task for referral coordinators in many health systems. The conventional patient referral process (both inbound and outbound) results in more stress for the referral coordinators and poor patient satisfaction. This inefficiency in the patient referral process leads to frustrated referral coordinators, physicians, specialists, patients and health systems as a whole. Patients not showing up for scheduled appointments are revenue loss for health systems that are trying to keep their patients within the network for better outcomes.

Today’s patient referral process makes it hard for patients to get the care they need, and healthcare facilities the visibility they need in the process. Additional challenges like lack of communication amongst providers, appointment delays, no-show rates, incorrect referral, etc. all have far-reaching consequences. Ineffective communication between clinical teams leads to poor health outcomes of patients and lost revenue for health systems. It is not a surprising fact, that more than half of the PCPs and Specialists are dissatisfied with the information they receive during a referral.

How to eliminate these challenges in the referral process?

A technological referral solution that offers end-to-end automation and is convenient for patients and providers is required to actively manage referrals and improve efficiency.

Healthcare providers need to adapt to an advanced technological solution that

– is patient experience focused, process-driven, and easy to use

– improves PCP, specialist experiences

– has end-to-end referral workflow automation

– intuitive dashboards with data insights and analytics

HealthViewX Patient Referral Management Solution is designed to help providers to focus on delivering high-quality coordinated care by keeping track of their patients throughout the care continuum. The solution makes the referral process efficient and simple with no burden on practice staff. It helps improve patient experience, reduces the burden on staff, improves operational efficiency, and overall benefits the health system in processing referrals.

Streamlining the patient referral process can help with

– better care for individuals and the community as a whole

– lowered cost and improved operational efficiency

– reduced paperwork for referrals

– awareness of in-network and out-of-network providers

– improved patient experience and value-based care drive

– better care coordination among providers

– visibility into real-time data to understand referral patterns, referral staff performance, patient status tracking, and gaps in care.

HealthViewX Patient Referral Management Solution helps solve challenges in all stages of the referral workflow to meet the needs of the patients, healthcare providers, and payers, and also integrates seamlessly with all EMR systems. An intelligent end-to-end automated solution is essential for better provider connectivity, reducing network leakages, improving quality care, and better health outcomes.

Schedule a demo today with our experts to understand how our solution seamlessly solves challenges in the patient referral process.

How to reduce referral leakage in large hospitals?

For many large enterprise hospitals, referral leakage may amount to millions of dollars in lost revenue. Patient referrals are an important revenue generator for hospitals and losing patients to other providers can cost these hospitals upto 20 percent of their revenue. Dissatisfaction with the current referral process is widespread and every patient seeking care elsewhere is now, and potentially in the future a lost revenue opportunity for the hospitals.

Signs of an underperforming referral management system that results in referral leakage:

Inability to get complete information to process referrals at one go:

Communicating complete patient information at the time of specialty referral is crucial for high-quality consultation and coordinated patient care. The inability to get complete information leads to patient dissatisfaction, delay in processing referrals and referral leakage.

Difficulty in finding the right provider within the network:

One of the major causes of patient referral leakage is difficulty in finding the right specialist within the network. Nearly half of the physicians surveyed said they have trouble determining who is in-network. Physicians could avoid referring out-of-network if they had information about all in-network providers.

More time spent in processing each referral:

On average referral coordinators take 15-20 minutes or sometimes more to process each referral on the receiving end just for checking missing patient information. The staff time spent coordinating referrals and their visits is tedious and time-consuming.

High patient no-show rates and referral leakage:

Patient no-show rates or missed appointments cost the U.S. health systems more than $150 billion a year. Lack of quality care and coordination among care stakeholders leads to higher no-show rates or referral leakage, due to which patient experience takes a big hit.

Manual communication and tracking systems:

Manual processes like insurance preauthorization, checking for missed patient information, etc are time-consuming Such time-consuming and cumbersome manual processes may lead to patient dissatisfaction.

Lack of referral analytics for informed decision making:

Lack of data of the referrals flowing in and out of the network affects decision making. Referral analytics gives comprehensive data on the number of patients with various referral status.

The ability to significantly improve the effectiveness of the referral process lies in the referral process standardization and technological capabilities.

Here’s how to reduce referral leakage

Standardization of processes:

Inconsistency in the patient referral process between the referring provider and the receiving provider is common. Right from obtaining prior authorization, finding the right specialist for the patient, collecting the required information for the referral, coordinating for patient appointments, etc. large hospitals are often challenged throughout the process. Hospitals need to streamline their referral workflow to achieve efficiency and have standard workflows and processes to streamline the end-to-end referral process. Achieving this efficiency in the referral process requires well-defined workflows.

Technology solution and capabilities:

Despite having an approach to monitoring and managing patient referrals, existing systems are often unable to simplify referral workflows to effectively manage the end-to-end referral process. Right from tracking authorization status, scheduling appointments, calculating referral conversion rates, staff productivity, etc. all are challenging in the current referral process. A referral solution that is efficient, technologically advanced, and has the capability to automate the end-to-end referral process is the need today. Connecting the information to objectives, understanding the workflow to obtain the information, and most importantly getting the data analytics for informed decision making will be more valuable.

Referral Management Solution – A worthwhile investment

A focused referral management process has the potential to maximize utilization, standardize processes, and enable streamlined workflows. Hospitals need to invest in solutions that will reduce referral leakage and increase patient volumes.

HealthViewX Patient Referral Management solution has features that best suit a hospitals’ Referral Management System. A 30-minute demo with our team will help you understand how effective our solution can track and manage the referral life cycle.

How to build a strong referral network for your medical practice

Health systems and hospitals need to build a high performing and strong referral network as they serve a large community. For most health systems, out-of-network providers/physicians are the main sources for new patients. Hence in today’s highly competitive healthcare market, it is crucial for the health system to build, strengthen and maintain these referral relationships to have a strong referral network.

A strong referral network would need patients, referring physicians and receiving providers to keep a healthy network going. A referral solution has the potential to build a strong referral network.

Here are some reasons as to why you need a solution to build a strong referral network

Health systems need to reduce referral leakage and ensure they don’t refer patients out of their network
Referral coordinators have to ensure timely scheduled appointments for their patients
Health systems need to reduce their no-show rates
Referral coordinators need to coordinate care between the internal and external providers for better patient outcomes.
Hospitals / Health systems need to create and manage a high performing referral network
To obtain more complete and detailed analytics to improve their patient inflow
Track patient status at every stage and ensure referral loop closure

Healthcare providers need to adopt healthcare IT and embrace interoperability. Therefore, the only way to build this strong referral network is to identify and implement the right referral solution for your practice.

HealthViewX Patient referral management solution can bring in the following benefits for the health systems and help strengthen your referral network

Reduced patient no-show rate
Reduced referral leakage
Increase operational efficiency
Patient satisfaction
Increased revenue
Streamlined referral life cycle management

Making small changes in the way health systems handle referrals will help to retain the patients within the network. Thus, retaining patients within the network, giving quality care will lead to better clinical outcomes. HealthViewX patient referral management solution acts as a bridge and enables seamless communication between the referring provider and the receiving provider. It helps in making meaningful decisions on the referral process thus making the change that the health system requires today.

Staying ahead in healthcare technology is imperative as it will bring massive benefits to the day-to-day operations and can empower the practice as a whole. A more streamlined process can lead to patient satisfaction, happier referral sources and patients thus making the network strong through quality care. Once the entire referral process is fine-tuned providers can fully focus on patient care and relationships with referral sources.

Optimizing referral management will help large health systems and hospitals improve overall efficiency and referral network. Data analytics feature will help providers to understand – the referral patterns, the highest referring source, the lowest referring provider, no-show rates, referral leakage, missed appointments, etc. HealthViewX works with each of its clients to understand their current challenges in the referral system and tunes the referral process to overcome these challenges and build a strong referral network.

HealthViewX patient referral management is highly customizable and is used by leading FQHCs, Large Hospitals, Dental Universities, and Specialities. Do you want to build a strong referral network?

Schedule a demo with HealthViewX referral management solution experts today!