Christie McWilliams
Sep 5 2023
Reading Time: 3 minutes
According to a recent article in Home Health Care News, the percentage of respondents who consider strengthening relationships with referral sources as their top growth opportunity went up by 10.5% compared to the previous year. This ranked second on HCP’s list of top growth areas, with 26.8% of respondents identifying it as number one.
What does this mean for your organization? It’s simple: strengthening referral relationships is a key opportunity for growth. Here’s a roundup of three CitusHealth insights into what referral partners expect from home-based care providers, how to improve these relationships and the importance of care team optimization.
Seamless communication improves referral relationships
Key frustrations among referring providers include unnecessary phone calls, lack of visibility into the patient care journey, delayed start of care, and reliance on fax. Improving your digital toolset can help you communicate seamlessly, see patients in a timely manner, and be more productive both in person and through virtual care — making you a more reliable post-acute care partner to your referral sources.
Here are five ways more efficient communication can improve referral relationships:
- Adopt digital tools that keep referral sources involved in the patient care journey.
- Avoid noncompliance through omnichannel communication that drives adherence to the care plan.
- Reduce unnecessary rehospitalizations with real-time communication, promoting faster insight for patient concerns and more accurate judgements.
- Give referral sources more visibility into the care journey through care team collaboration.
- Prioritize patient care by better managing disease states at home to help avoid acute events.
How to meet referral source expectations in home infusion
With the home infusion industry seeing immense growth, it’s becoming a competitive landscape — so how can your pharmacy stand out? For smaller, regional providers, trying to keep up with national-sized competitors can be frustrating. The truth is you’re not going to beat competitors in size, which is why your focus needs to be on delivering a superior product and service.
To capture the attention of referral sources as a local provider, it’s important to meet — and exceed — their expectations. Here are the two services referral sources expect and how technology can help you meet them to develop long-term partnerships.
- Start of care needs to be fast, which is why it’s important to choose an all-in-one platform built to speed up SOC, increase documentation accuracy and drive seamless communication.
- Patients should thrive under your care because referral partners want to see that you’re doing better than your competitors.
The importance of care team optimization in referral management
The challenge for many home-based care organizations is that the communication methods used to get information from referral sources to initiate and complete a discharge plan are dated and manual. Fax is often used to get demographic and supporting documentation that meet payor criteria to their office, multiple phone calls are needed to follow up to make sure the fax is received, education often happens at the bedside, paperwork must be signed in person, and many texts and emails for everything in between.
With the right technology, home-based care providers can streamline their referral process. CitusHealth was built to optimize care teams with seamless communication and digital tools that make care collaboration easier than ever. The information shared supports fast billing, an informed referral source, and most importantly, an informed patient prepared to start service.
Talk to a CitusHealth expert to discover how we can improve your referral relationships.
