Referral Lab continues to evolve as users share feedback and the development team brings more features to the tool to help those users fill in the gaps that practice management software can't fill. One of the newest features we are especially proud of is the Referral Inbox. It allows you to generate an embeddable Referral Form for your website that referring providers and their teams can complete instead of sending you an email or making a call. The referring provider is able to go to your practice website, pull up the form, complete a few fields, attach imaging or other files if they would like to, and then click submit. The referring provider can print off the completed referral form for the patient or their records and your practice information will be at the top of the page to help direct the patient.
When the referring provider hits submit on that form on your website, that referral is dropped into your practice's Referral Inbox. You can even adjust the settings to email up to three addresses in your practice when a referral is received and send a copy of the referral form to the practice. Now your team does not have to enter the patient information. Instead, your team can simply open the completed referral form, confirm the case type, confirm the referring provider and practice, and download any attachments with the referral form. The referral is now in Referral Lab with a status Consult Pending and referral method of RL Referral Form.
After we launched this update in December, we shared it with users when we were on calls. Some practices were able to eliminate expensive referral portal services. Because the settings for the Referral Inbox can be accessed through your admin menu, you are able to update the field settings or email addresses any time. For example, if you discover that you need to make the Referring Practice Email field mandatory because too many practices are not including it and it is important for your team to have that information, then you can switch the toggle for mandatory on and save your changes. Because the code does not need to be updated, the changes you make in your Referral Inbox Settings will be automatically updated on your website form. No need to call your IT support or pay an additional fee to make that change. The Referral Inbox is a part of your monthly subscription to Referral Lab.
Other practices that never had referrals submitted through their old online referral forms found that our Referral Lab form was so simple that they started getting referrals via the inbox. It turns out that their old forms were complicated or required an additional login and password to access. No one wants to keep track of another password if they don't have to! We have found that the simplicity of our Referral Lab form keeps it approachable for people who are talking with the hygienist, the patient, and have a phone call on hold at the same time. If some of your referring providers are emailing or faxing you, they may find your referral form a painless switch.
The practices with multiple providers or multiple locations are able to benefit from the Referral Inbox as well! We allow the referring provider to choose a specific company provider or company location when sending the referral. The completed form will be sent to the appropriate location if there is more than one and the patient can be sure that they are seeing a specific provider within that practice.
If you think the Referral Inbox and the online Referral Form may solve some of your pain points, but you are not sure where to start, watch our new onboarding video chapter on the Referral Inbox, send us an email, or book a quick zoom call. This solution is a part of the Referral Lab software now and we want to make sure that you are getting the most out of your subscription!
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