You can use flyers or referral pads to market your practice to potential physician referral partners.
Your referral pads and flyers can have your phone and fax numbers to receive referrals.
Or, you can also sign up for various 3rd party physician referral software as well.
Most of these software do have a way to fax you the referral as well.
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What happens when a patient referral is faxed over?
In this case, the doctor or doctor’s staff writes down the name and number of the patient, some more patient related information and sends a fax to the referred to doctor.
They tell the patient that the referred to doctor’s office will call the patient to set up an appointment.
Here, the referring doctor knows that they referred the patient.
The referred to doctor also knows that they were sent a referral.
That’s at least better than not knowing if you received a referral or not.
That’s better than not knowing whether your patient referral was received or not.
The challenge is that there is not much you as the physician leader can do to track these. You are left at the mercy of your staff to see these referrals to completion.
Closed loop referrals management are hard to do with faxes.
How about referrals sent using a physician referral software?
In this case, the doctor or doctor’s staff uses a product (e.g. ReferWell , ReferralMD , mdreferralpro, SmartMD , P2P etc) to send the referral to referred to doctor.
This only works when the provider you are referring the patient to, is also using this software.
Otherwise, the specialist office gets a fax or an email that they have a referral.
The specialist office then needs to provide a code from the fax or the email to retrieve the referral.
The referring provider staff enter the name and number of the patient, some more patient related information and send the referral to the referred to doctor.
They tell the patient that the referred to doctor’s office will call the patient to set up an appointment.
In this case, the referring doctor knows that they referred the patient.
The referred to doctor also knows that they were sent a referral.
The same problems with faxes arise here as well.
Referring partners cannot really force each other to use a specific referral software.
Those are the realities – you just need to understand those and live with them.