Artera's Referral Management solution allows you to quickly follow up on referrals received by your organization with automated patient outreach.  

Benefits of Referral Management

• Simplify Patient Experience: Introducing Conversational Messaging in the referral process makes it easier for patients to schedule referrals, leading to more referrals scheduled overall. Click here to learn more about Conversational Messaging.

• Create Staff Efficiency: Staff can manage multiple referral scheduling requests simultaneously, making it more efficient than phone outreach. 

• Only Schedule Authorized Referrals: You can configure the platform to only message patients with authorized referrals, building greater control into the scheduling process.

Referral Management Flow

Referral Management Setup

We recognize that customers have varying needs when it comes to managing their Referrals. We have built Artera Referrals to allow for the following customization options: 

1. Centralized or Decentralized Referral Management

2. Referral Routing based on Specialty or Location

3. Referral Triggers by Referral Creation or Scheduling Status Change

4. Referral Trigger messages using standard Triggers or Conversation Flows
   
   

These setup options will determine how you create your Triggers and manage referrals. 
NOTE: Your Project Manager will work with you to determine the setup that aligns best with your current workflow. However, some options may be dictated by the data that can be populated through your Artera integration. 

Centralized or Decentralized

Artera allows you to choose a Centralized or Decentralized Referral build:

• Centralized: All referrals populate into a single Practice and all Referral Triggers will be sent from the same line. This does not have to be an exclusive Referral Practice, but can be. 

• Decentralized: Referrals are populated into the specific Location or specialty in their respective Practices. Additionally, Referral Triggers will be sent from the Location or Speciality-specific line. 

Specialty or Location-based Routing

Artera can route the Referral to the appropriate Practice by "Referred to Location" or "Referred to Speciality". 

• Locations: Location routing will map the Location ID of the Referral to the Location ID in Artera. 

• Specialty: Specialty Routing requires the specialties to be created in Artera and assigned to individual Practices. This requires mapping the Specialty ID in your EMR to the Speciality Resource in Artera and allows you to choose which specialties you would like to support for referrals.
  
  

Click here to learn more about Referral Routing options, including configuring specialties. 

Referral Triggers 

You can send Referral Triggers using the "Referral Created", "Referral Authorization Status Change", or "Referral Scheduling Status Change" Trigger.

• Referral Created: This option will send a Referral Trigger after a designated amount of time from when the Referral was created, e.g. message the patient 15 minutes after the referral is created. This allows you to create a cadence of Triggers that will send based on the referral's creation time. 

• Referral Authorization Status Change: This option will send a Referral Trigger when the referral's authorization status changes from one status to another, e.g. from "Pending" to "Authorized". 

• Referral Scheduling Status Change: This option will send a Referral Trigger when the Referral’s scheduling status changes from one status to another, e.g. message the patient 15 minutes after the referral status is updated. This allows you to create a cadence of Triggers that will send based on updates to the referral’s scheduling status.

Click here to learn more about enabling the chosen Referral event trigger.

Referral Trigger Sending Options

When Practices send referral scheduling messages to patients, they are often outreaching to many patients at once. This can lead to an abundance of patients contacting your Scheduling Department simultaneously to get their Referrals scheduled. At times, this results in long hold times and can impact the patient experience.

As part of the referral-build process in Artera, Enterprise Users can indicate when the Referral Triggers should be sent to patients. 

• Immediately: Automated referral messages are sent directly to patients based on the configured Referral Triggers, without any throttling. 
• Based on Message Throttling within a Referral Triggers Queue: Referral message throttling allows your Enterprise to control the rate at which automated referral messages are sent. This controls the number of referral messages sent to patients at any time and in turn, helps manage the volume of inbound patient responses to referral outreach so staff is not overwhelmed. Click here to learn more about Referral Triggers Queues. 

Standard Triggers or Conversation Flows

Referral Triggers can be delivered using the standard Artera Trigger message option or with Conversation Flows. 

• Standard Triggers: This functionality is included with your referrals add-on. Write-backs for referrals are not supported with this process.

• Conversation Flows: This functionality allows you to work through multiple scheduling steps automatically through the Conversation Flows engine and does support write-backs for referral statuses.

Check out our related examples of referral messaging and cadence. Click here for instructions on building your referrals outreach in Conversation Flows. 

Referral Focus

Referral Management allows you to build workflows for managing Internal Referrals and Inbound External Referrals. 

• Internal Referrals: Referrals within your health system (e.g. referrals that stay within the same EMR). For example, the patient may receive a referral from their WH Primary Care provider to a WH Speciality provider. 

• Inbound External Referrals: Referrals from a different health system to your health system. For example, the patient may receive a referral from XZ Primary Care to a WH Speciality provider. This referral type can be supported as long as these referrals are ingested into your EMR’s work queue or can be provided to Artera through a flat file upload. 

• Outbound External Referrals: Referrals from your health system’s EMR to another organization are not supported.