Somewhere in the first two minutes of most of these calls, an administrator asks the same question, usually politely: so what’s the catch? It is a fair question. A free hour from someone who sells technology work sounds like a sales meeting.
So here is the whole hour written down — who is in the room, what gets asked, what you get afterwards, and what happens if you decide the answer is no.
01The first fifteen minutes: how a referral actually arrives
We start by tracing one referral from outside your building to the moment it becomes an appointment. Not the process as written in a manual — the process as it happened last week.
That usually means naming every door a referral can come through. The fax line. The EHR’s direct messaging. A PDF attached to an email. The referring provider’s office calling the front desk. A patient who self-refers and mentions a doctor’s name that nobody writes down. Most practices find they have four or five doors, and that two of them have no owner.
Then the harder question: when a referral arrives through each door, who sees it first, and what do they do in the next hour? This is where the picture in the administrator’s head and the picture at the front desk turn out to be two different pictures. Neither is wrong; they are describing different ways.
02The middle half hour: where the record stops being countable
The second stretch is about whether your referral history can be counted at all, which is a separate question from whether it is written down.
We look at where the record lives and what shape it is in. Is the referring office a field a person picks from a list, or a box a person types into? If it is typed, the same practice across town is probably in there three or four ways — abbreviated, misspelled, with and without the suffix — and every one of those counts as a different referrer in any report you run.
We look at call attempts. A note reading left message, will try again Thurs is useful to the person who reads it and invisible to any report. And we check whether a record can be saved half-finished, whether anyone can tell who changed what, and whether everyone who can read the list can also delete from it.
None of this is a criticism of how your practice keeps records.
A system built to hold a patient’s chart was never asked to count a relationship. The gap is in the category, not in your staff.
We have built a referral portal for a practice that had reached exactly this point — the spreadsheet was working right up until the day they needed to answer a question it could not answer. If your situation looks similar, we will say so plainly, and we will also say if it doesn’t.
03The last fifteen minutes: the questions you have no report for
The final stretch is a short list of questions. You do not need us in the room to try them — run them on your own practice this week and see how far you get.
- Name your ten largest referring providers, in order, for the last twelve months. Write the list from memory first, then check it against your records. The distance between the two lists is the first finding.
- Work out which of those ten sent fewer patients this quarter than last. Not a feeling about it — the count.
- Find every office that sent steadily and then sent nothing for ninety days. This is the one that usually cannot be answered without an afternoon of manual work.
- Time the report going back. Pick five recent referrals and count the days between the visit and the referring provider receiving the report. Then name the person accountable for that number.
Most practices get partway through question one and stop. That is not a failure of effort; it is what happens when the answer has to be assembled by hand every time anyone asks. The assembling-by-hand is usually the finding.
04What arrives 48 hours later
Within two business days you get written findings. They are short — a few pages, not a bound report. What they contain:
- A map of your referral intake. Every door, and who owns it.
- What can and cannot be counted today, and the specific reason for each thing that cannot.
- The questions you currently have no way to answer, listed plainly.
- What we would fix first, and why that one first — usually the cheapest change with the largest effect, which is often a process change rather than software.
- What we would leave alone. There is always something working that should not be touched.
You keep those findings whether or not we ever work together. There is no version of this where the document is held back pending a signature. If the right next step is something your existing vendor should be doing under a contract you already pay for, the findings will say that instead.
05If the answer is no
Then it is no, and that is the end of it. You still own a written account of how referrals move through your practice, which is useful regardless of who wrote it. Some practices will read the findings, fix two items internally, and never need a build. That is a good outcome, and it costs us an hour.
The hour is free for a practical reason, not a generous one: quoting work on a referral process nobody has mapped produces a bad quote, and a bad quote produces a project that disappoints everyone.
Worth an hour? If you can’t name your top ten referring providers in order, or you’re not sure which offices have gone quiet this quarter, that hour will tell you something you don’t currently know. Book a free referral audit →
Want to know where your practice stands?
One hour with your practice administrator. Written findings within 48 hours. No obligation.