The rate at which physicians refer patients to another physician has doubled over a period of 1999 to 2009. This increasing rate is steady across all groups and is growing even when majority of the physicians who had ownership stakes are moving more into an employee role with hospital systems. However still the referral process has been stuck with age old processes such as paper, fax without the ability to gain or track any intelligence out of it. Even today, many companies are focused on sending referrals over an glorified fax over email mechanism versus taking a harder closer look at the process. Some technology organizations tend to do the back end analysis however that doesn’t work especially majority of the physicians refer outside the system as the referral processes are complex and cumbersome to operate within an EMR or practice management system. Without simplifying the referral process with clinical integrations, no data that you mine will be of good. You will never know which one of these contributing factors are increasing your referrals outside the system and lead to referral leakages. Also in order to have a satisfied patient, all physicians who are involved in the referral chain needs to be constantly updated and have access to patient’s clinical data to provide a comprehensive care. If you want to know, how MedVoy is solving the age old referral process challenges, contact us now.
