How do you turn more referrals into booked appointments?

Where referred patients drop out

A referral gets accepted, your scheduler calls during the patient's workday, the patient misses it, and the voicemail never gets returned. A week later the referring office rings to ask whether their patient was seen. Nearly every step that stalls is a phone call, so the way to convert more referrals to appointments is to get the calls right.

A patient who says "Dr. Alvarez's office told me you'd call, but I work nights, so I keep missing you" can be booked into an afternoon slot then and there, if your rules have one, with no third round of voicemail.

The referral calls the agent takes

Patient referral automation has two halves: reading the referral and reaching the patient. The agent takes the second half, across three kinds of calls.

Calling referred patients to schedule

When your team marks a referral ready, the agent calls the patient, verifies their identity against your records and says which provider referred them. It offers open times with the specialist your rules match to that referral and books the visit on the call. If your policy prefers text, the agent sends one instead and the patient can reply to book.

Answering referred patients who call in

Referred patients often call before anyone reaches them. The agent finds the referral where your system shows it and books the visit. If the referral hasn't reached your system yet, it takes the details and routes the call to your referral coordinator, so the patient isn't told to try again later.

Taking calls from referring offices

Referring offices want to know how to send a referral and whether their patient is booked. The agent tells them where referrals go, whether that's your fax line or your portal, and confirms the appointment where your system shows it. Anything else goes to your referral team with the caller's name and practice attached.

The agent picks up once the referral is in your system

The agent does not read faxed referral packets. Your team, or the document tool you already use, turns the fax into a referral in your system, and your clinicians decide which referrals you accept and how soon each patient needs to be seen. From there, the agent works the phone and text side: it reaches the patient, books within your rules and answers the calls that follow.

That split decides where to begin, and we believe the place to start is accepted referrals still waiting for a booking, because the clinical review is done and what's left is a phone call. Run a report of accepted referrals with no appointment attached, and you have the list.

Connected to your scheduling and referral systems

The agent books into your scheduling system during the call. Epic connects through SMART on FHIR. If you run home health, hospice or DME, the Brightree connector covers scheduling and referrals. PolyAI also connects to athenahealth and ModMed, and to anything else with an API.

For your IT team: you build the agent in Dialog Studio (formerly Agent Studio) or as code with the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and test every change on a branch before it goes live. Referral calls run on PolyAI's Outbound Calling API, on the same platform as your inbound line, and you configure outreach around your patients' contact preferences and applicable consent requirements. Patient data runs under HIPAA Security Rule controls examined within our SOC 2+ report, and a business associate agreement (BAA) is available for eligible healthcare deployments.

What booking at scale looks like

SafeRide Health books non-emergency medical rides for Medicare and Medicaid members, including rides to dialysis, oncology and other life-sustaining care. Its agent raised success rates across call flows by 15% and cut average handle time by 20 to 30 seconds.