As a healthcare provider, you know how important patient referrals are to your practice. Referrals help you grow your practice, and they help demonstrate that you’re providing quality care to your patients. However, tracking patient referrals can be a challenging and time-consuming task, especially if you’re still using manual methods like spreadsheets or paper records.
In this blog post, we’ll explore what the benefits of collecting online patient referrals are, how to track patient referrals, and how to manage the patient referral process. Whether you’re a solo practitioner or managing a large medical group, this guide will help you get the most from the patient referral process.
The benefits of collecting and tracking patient referrals
While managing the referral process can be a time-intensive task, there are plenty of incentives for collecting patient referrals. Here are a few.
Grow your practice
Collecting patient referrals is an effective way to grow your medical practice. When other doctors refer patients or when patients refer their friends and family members, they send new business to you.
Referrals also boost your credibility and help establish the community’s trust in your quality of care. Patients are more likely to trust a provider when someone they know and respect has recommended them.
Focus your marketing efforts
Collecting patient referrals can help you identify which referral sources bring in the most patients. With this data, you can better allocate your marketing resources and be more assertive in seeking business from these sources. You could even strike up partnerships with practitioners who send a lot of patients your way.
Reduce paperwork
By using an online tool to collect patient referrals, you can reduce paperwork by an appreciable amount. “In the past, patient information was collected and stored on paper, and shared via mail or fax,” writes Shania Kennedy, assistant editor at Xtelligent Healthcare Media. “Some facilities still rely on these more traditional methods, which can cause significant inefficiencies and burdens for clinicians.”
Improve quality of care
Ultimately, having an effective way to collect patient referrals can improve quality of care.
“An electronic referral management solution will allow incomplete or inappropriate referrals to be corrected or redirected, saving any delays in care,” explains neurosurgeon Amos Dare. “The result is a better patient experience with reduced stress and anxiety. Email and SMS reminders to patients and their providers further ensures patient follow through with the referral and decreases the chances of the patient not showing up for their referrals.”
How to track patient referrals with Jotform
Jotform is an online form builder that offers features to enable HIPAA compliance and makes it easy to collect and track patient referrals. Embed the patient referral form template on your practice’s website to make it convenient for other medical practitioners to send patients your way. The template includes the fields most practices need, but you can always customize the form and add your own if you need to collect more data.
Then use Jotform Tables to automatically store all of the data your patient referral form collects. Customize Jotform’s referral tracking table template to align with your patient referral form, and then use the table as a centralized database for all your patient referral efforts.
By having all of your data in one place, you’ll be able to see which doctors drive the most referrals, which doctors are the most responsive, and which patients they’ve referred.
What’s great about Jotform is that it integrates with your existing tools. For instance, you can connect Jotform to your customer relationship management (CRM) system, email marketing tool, and project management platform. When all of your systems talk to each other, it’s a lot easier to keep on top of everything and deliver quality care.
Referrals are a crucial part of any medical practice, so it’s important to track them effectively. Jotform makes it simple to centralize your workflow and manage everything from a single database.
Photo by RDNE Stock project
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