It starts before anyone picks up the phone.

A fax arrives.

Someone on your team manually enters the data, creates or matches a patient record, attaches the documents, and routes it to the right queue.

With 70% of providers still exchanging medical information by fax,³ this is the reality for most organizations. For a team of six processing thousands of referrals a month, the backlog builds faster than they can clear it.

While your team works the queue, the patient is already drifting.

No one has called. No one has texted.

The patient doesn't know if their referral was received, lost, or sitting in a pile. So they start calling around. They Google other specialists.

They put it off. Some just forget.

The longer the gap between referral and first contact, the less likely that patient ever schedules.

Nationally, about half of the 100 million specialist referrals requested each year are never completed.¹ One peer-reviewed study at a major health system found the actual documented completion rate was closer to 35%.²

The patients who do stay engaged hit another wall.

Weeks-long wait times. Full schedules. Someone who already waited days for a callback is not going to tolerate another long wait to be seen. They cancel. They no-show. They find care somewhere else.

This is the snowball:

• Slow intake causes patient disengagement.

• Disengagement lowers tolerance for access barriers.

• Access barriers end in no care at all.

And 65% of health system leaders say this kind of leakage is actively preventing them from hitting their financial goals.⁴

Most organizations can't see it happening because referral data lives in five different places.
By the time anyone notices, the patient is gone.

Feel familiar? If so, Hatch connects the full referral lifecycle in one system so your team can see where referrals stall and act before they're lost. Request a demo.

Sources:

• ¹ 100M+ referrals/year, ~50% never completed — IHI/NPSF, Closing the Loop: A Guide to Safer Ambulatory Referrals in the EHR Era (2017). Endorsed by AAFP. ihi.org / aafp.org

• ² 34.8% documented completion rate at a large health system — Patel et al., "Closing the Referral Loop: An Analysis of Primary Care Referrals to Specialists in a Large Health System," Journal of General Internal Medicine (2018). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  
  

• ³ 70% of providers still use fax to exchange medical information — Steve Posnack, ONC Deputy National Coordinator, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, via Bloomberg Law (2021). news.bloomberglaw.com
  
  

• ⁴ 65% of health system leaders say patient leakage blocks financial goals — ABOUT Healthcare, Patient Leakage & Keepage Report, independent survey of 138 health system executives (2022). prnewswire.com