Hatch
Platform
Solutions
Resources
Pricing
Log in
Case Study · Texas Orthopedics · Referral Management
How Texas Orthopedics unlocked $150k/mo in incremental referral revenue without hiring more staff.
A faster referral process turns existing referrals into visits sooner, with a better experience and clearer visibility end to end.
Texas Orthopedics
Hatch
Incremental Revenue
+$150K
/mo
Referral-sourced revenue per month
Faster Throughput
+400
/mo
Referrals processed by the same team
Increased Conversion
68%
88%
Referral-to-appointment rate
Lower Cost
$6
$1
Cost per processed referral
Overview
Texas Orthopedics (TXO), a division of OrthoLoneStar, serves the Austin market with 39 physicians offering comprehensive musculoskeletal care.
A centralized referral team processes 1,200 referrals per month. TXO partnered with Hatch to extend their Athena-based workflow through automation and visibility.
“We had already centralized and standardized our referral process. But we had reached the limit of how much we could grow with manual workflows and spreadsheets.”
Tanner Sloan
COO, Texas Orthopedics
The Challenge
Volume kept climbing. The manual workflow underneath it could not.
Austin is one of the most competitive orthopedic markets in the country, and patients expect the same level of convenience and experience they get everywhere else. Referral volume kept climbing and the team had reached the ceiling of what spreadsheets and manual effort could absorb.
Fragmented, manual intake
The same referral often arrived through multiple channels, and every one needed a chart built by hand and insurance re-entered before a coordinator could start working it.
Slow first contact
Receipt to first patient outreach ran about 65 hours, long enough to lose patients to a faster competitor.
Patient communication gap
Between referral and first contact, patients heard nothing and had no way to check where their referral stood. When volume spiked, that silence stretched even longer.
Manual tracking
Team leads pulled a manual count from Athena twice a day into a spreadsheet to track outstanding referrals and turnaround.
The team had already optimized the workflow. The constraint was the volume of manual processing it took to take a referral from receipt to visit.
The Solution
One platform for automated referral workflows and end-to-end visibility.
TXO brought Hatch live with its centralized referral team, starting with intake. The impact was immediate. Referrals that once had to be chased down across fax, Athena routing, Leading Reach, and email are now captured and presented in a single queue, parsed and ready to work. The manual chart creation and data entry that consumed the front of every referral was eliminated — Hatch’s bi-directional Athena integration built the chart, wrote demographics and the insurance package back to Athena, and resolved duplicates automatically.
That recovered time went to a good place. Coordinators now spend their day on the referrals that need human judgement instead of repetitive data entry.
The patient experience improved right away. With the referral team no longer chasing documents and re-typing data, referral lag time dropped dramatically. Outreach within 24 hours used to be a lofty goal. Reaching patients while they’re still in the parking lot is now an average Wednesday.
As for referring providers? They’re now getting a similar treatment. Automatic status updates give them confidence their patients are being cared for, prevent status-check phone calls, and preserve the reputation TXO worked so hard to build. Referring physicians and physician owners are happier.
With the referral team settled in, a whole new executive benefit emerged: unprecedented operational and growth visibility. Volume, aging, conversion, leakage, downstream surgeries, time in status, and more became visible in real time. The twice-daily accountability logs that took leads an hour to fill out every day were replaced. Leadership can now see where an individual referral has stalled and spot team-wide trends in time to first contact.
“We were riding a bicycle that took all our energy just to get up the hill, and we were constantly sliding backwards. Now we’re in a vehicle with lane assist — taking that power and steering it where we want to go.”
Tanner Sloan, COO, Texas Orthopedics
Operational Results
Faster at every stage of the referral.
With charts built automatically and one queue to work, coordinators move faster at every stage.
Metric
Before Hatch
With Hatch
Referral-to-appointment conversion
68%
88%
Receipt to first patient outreach
65 hrs
12 hrs
Time to process a referral
18 min
2 min
Document processing, per inbound doc
8 min
30 sec
Referral to scheduled visit
8 days
4 days
“I’m not building charts anymore. The referral comes in already done, so I just work it and move on. I’m getting through more in a day than I used to, and I’m not staying late to do it.”
RC
Referral coordinator
Texas Orthopedics
“For the first time I can actually see what each coordinator is working. I finally have the numbers to build the bonus structure I’ve been trying to put together for two years.”
Hana Gross
North Director, Texas Orthopedics
Additional Wins
An elevated experience for all involved.
For the referral team
Leadership now has the visibility to manage performance and create data-driven incentives aligned with actual coordinator output.
For the referring provider community
Referring partners now receive automated status updates as patients progress through Texas Orthopedics. Follow-ups that once required manual effort now run automatically.
For physician leadership
Leaders can discuss referral performance with physician owners in standard terms, volume, conversion, speed-to-appointment, and revenue by source, and see which sources to invest in.
For the patient
Patients gain faster access to scheduled visits and more timely, consistent communication from TXO compared to previous manual workflows.
Referral Management for Specialty Care
See what Hatch could do for your referral process.
Specialty care groups use Hatch to raise conversion, expand coordinator capacity, and lower the cost of moving a patient from referral to scheduled visit.
Hatch
Referral management for specialty care. Automate the full referral lifecycle, from intake to insight.
Product
Platform
Solutions
Integrations
Pricing
Company
About
Customers
Careers
Contact
Resources
Case studies
Blog
Help center
Security
© 2026 Hatch. All rights reserved.
Privacy
Terms