Total Referral Program Management

The Referral Stream™ Solution

AnnectoMed's Referral Stream™ is a comprehensive solution for hospital centers seeking to better manage their referral intake, review, and delivery processes.   Referral Stream™ enables hospitals to increase their capacity to handle large referral volumes without incurring additional costs.  Referral Stream™ hospitals can expand referral source panels by offering a unique incentive to providers:  online patient tracking, guarantee of patient ownership, and ease-of-use.  Any hospital center that accepts referrals for consultative services and ambulatory procedures from primary care sources, whether credentialed affiliates, internal staff, faculty practices, primary care outstations, or non-allied providers, will benefit from the comprehensive workflow management, patient tracking, and reporting features of  Referral Stream™ .

Unlike electronic medical records (EMRs), which consolidate and share patient clinical data, Referral Stream™ is an electronic referral transaction management system that automates numerous quantifiable business processes. As the ideal method for physicians or other primary caregivers to direct patients to a hospital facility for specific clinical encounters or diagnostic procedures, each Referral Stream™ transaction saves real dollars in processing costs and provides an attractive incentive to providers to refer patients to Referral Stream™   hospitals.   Referral Stream™   also lowers exposure by tracking patient navigation through the often fragmented care delivery system.

Referral Stream™ manages patient transactions through the entire referral transactional lifecycle to ensure end-to-end process and patient navigation satisfaction. Hospital management can review and measure data by referring provider, medical service type, processing duration, and many other data slices. This enables hospital administrators and executives to identify and leverage new revenue-generating opportunities, analyze the quality of individual referral sources, and right-size clinical service offerings.  The operational business knowledge gained by Referral Stream™ generally cannot be achieved under traditional operational processes without investing significant staff resources and dollars to compile and analyze disparate data sources such as logs, medical records, and spreadsheets.

Because Referral Stream™  is a powerful means for building business relationships that can increase revenue, as well as a solution for community providers to refer patients for specialty consultations and ambulatory procedures and also monitor patient progress through an often cumbersome journey, the focused Referral Stream™ customer is the mid-to-large hospital facility or hospital network. The community provider becomes a beneficiary of Referral Stream™  whenever given access by the hospital facility, usually at no cost. 

Referral Stream™ also fills a current HIT lacuna, in that there are few robust tools available that automate external referral capture, internal referral and fulfillment processes, and offer an attractive incentive to community physicians to join a hospital referral network. This is an important consideration for AnnectoMed’s long-term success, as there are a myriad of opportunities for  Referral Stream™  to integrate with medical software products and systems including EMRs, electronic ordering systems, patient demographic systems, physician credentialing systems, and billing systems.  Read how Referral Stream™ can serve your organization. 

Benefits to Hospital Systems

Referral Stream™  provides a solution for three key integrated business objectives:

1. Leverage optimized tools for a busy referral office to handle current referrals and also increase capacity to successfully intake, review, route, schedule, and close a significantly greater number of referrals without increasing staff and OTPS costs.
   

2. Expedite communication among the stakeholders:  referring provider, internal hospital primary care department, referral office, ambulatory care management, clinical departments, administration, health information management, and patients.
   

3. Provide an attractive, trust-building incentive for non-staff providers and non-affiliated free-standing facilities and programs to refer their patients to your hosptial network.  Couple this with the ability to monitor recruitment outreach activities for a robust enterprise solution.  
   

Benefits to Your Provider Panel

Referral Stream™  instills confidence in your providers and enablers them to enjoy streamlined referral processes as well:

1. Providers can submit referrals through Referral Stream™  or continue to use traditional Faxing. If exercising the Referral Stream™  option, providers can attach documents, print-out prerequisites and prep notices.
   
   

2. Provider offices will experience a significant decrease in phone calls, referral rejections, and requests for additional information. 
   
   

3. Providers can track the patient's navigation at all times and have the assurance they will remain the owner of their patients.
   
   

4. Providers receive online consultation notes and supporting documentation, or if they prefer, by Fax through a secure Fax method that audits the transaction.
   
   

5. If the hospital system permits, providers will have the opportunity to send their patients to other providers within the hospital's Referral Stream™  network, and also receive new referrals.   
     

Benefits to Patients

The patient experience is an important consideration because a positive experience often translates to new opportunities and faster payments for your hospital.  Satisfied patients builds confidence among your referral sources, and patients themselves serve as an important marketing resource. 

1. Patients experience easy and friendly navigation through a sometimes daunting journey.
   
   

2. Patients receive improved guidance and communications in their own language.
   
   

3. Using Referral Stream™  data to right-size and right-schedule clinical services, patients benefit from greater access to consultants.
   

4. Continuity of care is assured because the referring provider is part of the process; s/he has 24x7 access to consultation results and diagnostic results.  

Click here to read our Case Studies to learn how  Referral Stream™  has redefined the culture at 11 acute hospital centers and services thousands of providers and over 150,000 patients a year.