Healthcare & InteroperabilityA client comes into your behavioral health practice complaining of constant fatigue and brain fog. You hear them out, ask a few questions, and decide it’s time to loop in their primary care provider (PCP). After the session, you fax over a referral.
From there, you’re left in the dark. Did the other office get the referral? Did the patient book an appointment? There’s no easy way to know.
Large organizations usually have care coordinators to ensure these loops get closed. But in smaller settings, that responsibility typically falls to already overextended clinicians. Breakdowns in tracking and communication at this stage are a key reason why nearly 50% of referrals aren’t completed.
The good news is that digital tools can help close these gaps in a cost- and time-efficient manner.
The Cost of Missed Handoffs
When a referral disappears into the void, patients pay the price. A CRICO Strategies analysis of 23,000 malpractice claims found that communication failures resulted in a staggering 2,000 preventable deaths.
It’s frustrating for providers, too. You’ve made a clinical judgment and recommended next steps, but once that referral is out the door, you lose control of the situation. Did the patient get better? Were they ever even seen? Unless the patient brings it up at a future visit, you may never know.
It’s frustrating. It’s inefficient. And it erodes trust in the broader care system.
Why Referrals Fall Through
Referrals are a routine part of care, especially in complex cases where other providers need to step in. But in practice, these handoffs fall apart for all sorts of reasons:
- No formal process. Many practices don’t have a reliable system in place to track referral status. That leaves teams guessing whether a fax or note actually made it to the next provider.
- Manual communication methods. The manual methods that small practices rely on make things worse. If they send a fax, they have no way of knowing if it was received and processed. The same goes for voicemail reminders — they’re easy to miss and impossible to track.
- Staffing constraints. Even when referrals go through, the receiving practice may not have the capacity to take on the patient. That’s especially true in home health. A 2023 analysis found that only about 35% of referrals were accepted by U.S. agencies.
What Small Teams Can Do Differently
Small practices may not have the resources of larger health systems, but there are still actions they can take to dramatically reduce referral breakdowns.
Close the Loop
One of the most effective things you can do is track referrals from start to finish. This can be as simple as logging referrals in a shared spreadsheet and reviewing it once a week. Teams that have the bandwidth may even assign someone to own referral follow-up for the whole practice.
The goal is to make sure no referral goes out without a plan to check that it was received, scheduled, and completed.
Embrace Tech Tools
If you’re already sending referrals by fax, upgrading to a digital fax platform is a low-effort way to gain better oversight. Traditional fax machines offer zero visibility past the point you hit “send.” But with a digital fax platform like eFax Unite™, you get confirmation that the referral was delivered and viewed. It can even flag referrals that haven’t been acknowledged, nudging you to follow up.
Streamline Intake
On the receiving side, more practices are adopting digital intake tools to shorten response times and keep the referring provider in the loop. These tools are often separate from their core electronic health record (EHR) system, and help teams automatically triage incoming referrals, collect key patient details upfront, and send real-time updates back to the referring provider.
Some also lean on third-party care navigators to personally check in with high-risk patients to make sure they’re staying on track.
Don’t Let Referrals Disappear
Small practices have more power than they think when it comes to reducing referral drop-offs. Minor tweaks, like a shared spreadsheet or a smart digital fax tool, can go a long way.
eFax Unite makes it easier to follow up, follow through, and ensure the treatments and interventions recommend are carried out.
Request a demo of eFax Unite to learn more.
