Working in the field of home health and hospice care teaches you that coordinated care vastly improves patient outcomes. We know a smooth transition from an inpatient or hospital facility to home healthcare or hospice improves patient safety and reduces the risk of preventable complications. Conversely, when patients have difficulty following up with specialists or continuing their care at home, this can negatively affect their health outcomes.
Missing or incomplete referrals prevent many patients from seeing specialists or following up. With referrals flying into your office via several different sources including fax, email, portals, and EHR systems, it can be hard to keep track of them all. When a care team has to match documents manually and track referrals from multiple sources, this significantly slows down the referral process and increases the chances of lost referrals.
Modernizing your workflows using automation helps keep referrals from going missing. Here’s how it works.
Why Manual Processes Don’t Scale
Manually processing referrals from multiple sources is a time-consuming task. Since fax, email, and EHR referrals aren’t usually standardized in their format, your team has to decipher the information in order to prepare for intake. When care teams have to manually standardize forms and track down missing information, this can mean an estimated 10% of their clinic time goes to the process of managing referrals alone.
Many faxed forms lack context or structure, meaning your team has to spend time on the phone with the referrer to find missing forms or other patient data. Email referrals can get lost or buried in inboxes, particularly if the referrer sends it to a generic email instead of a specific person.
Outdated manual processes also make it harder to coordinate with referring physicians and facilities. Your team has to request relevant patient notes, verify insurance information, and match patient information against each referral. Meanwhile, your patient is not being treated properly. Long wait times or other inefficiencies during the referral or onboarding process may even cause a patient to seek assistance from a specialist that’s not in their network.
The whole manual referral process is frustrating for practitioners and patients alike.
What Automation Fixes Instantly
Bringing your referral system into the digital age speeds up the referral process and gives your administrative team easy, immediate access to the right information needed for hospice or home health intake. Using a digital referral management system lets you automate workflows to make the patient onboarding process faster and more effective.
Healthcare solutions for referrals can preauthorize insurance and scan referral documents for missing information. You can set automations to send the referral back to the patient’s physician if any information is incomplete or incorrect. If a referral passes the initial review, referral management software will match the request with the proper specialist, so your team isn’t routing referrals to multiple people.
Digital referral management tools will automatically organize and sort referral documents so your administrative team doesn’t have to. Many of these tools use digital templates and forms you can pre-fill with patient information and other standard data. The system will autopopulate details such as the patient’s medical history, referring agency information, referral type, and more.
These tools cut down on manual data entry, which reduces referral errors. Choosing a solution that operates with your EHR and health information exchange programs allows for continuous coordination between you and the referrer. Your team has all the information they need on hand during patient intake, and you can start treatments faster.
How WorldView Helps You Capture Every Referral
WorldView offers multiple solutions to enhance referral capture and automation.
Referral AI
Our Referral AI tool reads and routes referral documents instantly. Once the system identifies a referral, it will sort documents into the correct service and highlight key information such as payer type or diagnosis.
Once a referral is confirmed, the system prioritizes intake documents. The system also routes the referral to a queue to create an electronic medical record for the patient. When the system identifies an incomplete referral, it flags the missing items and routes the referral to a queue to be completed.
Your team can access referrals in one location and easily identify missing patient data, health records, insurance information, and more.
MedAttach
When you get a referral for an existing patient, MedAttach will match it to the existing patient record. Your team can easily assess the patient’s history along with the referral notes and start planning the proper treatment.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Physical paper records are another drawback of manual referral processes. Your team has to store the files and dig through multiple boxes and shelves whenever they receive a referral. WorldView’s ECM lets you index, store, and retrieve files from a simple cloud-based platform.
Your team can look for documents using keywords and other drag-and-drop features instead of rifling through mountains of papers.
Conclusion: More Referrals, Less Scramble
Referrals are the lifeblood of any home health or hospice agency; they're vital for growing revenue. Speeding up intake lets you accept more referrals. It also makes your patients happier because you can start treating them sooner, and it reduces instances of lost referrals that bar patient access to care. Digital healthcare document management also means your team has access to a patient's entire medical history, which helps minimize the risk of adverse events.
Automation also creates structure and accountability. You can assign parts of your workflow to different team members who then take ownership of each task. Your team members also understand their responsibilities so there is less overlap. Everyone works faster to deliver excellent patient care.
Contact us today to learn more about WorldView’s referral automation solutions.
