What a doctor referral network is
Your referral network is every source that has sent you a patient in the last year, plus every source that should. For an orthopedic surgeon it is a few dozen primary care, urgent care and PT offices. For an orthodontist it is every general and pediatric dentist within driving distance. For a home health agency it is case managers at three hospitals and a dozen skilled nursing facilities. Map it and you have the network. Work it and you have a practice that grows on its own.
Step one: map your current network
Pull a year of new patients and attribute each to a referral source. Rank the sources by volume and by the kind of cases they send. Most practices find that 20 percent of sources send 80 percent of referrals, that a handful of once productive sources have gone quiet, and that there are obvious offices in the market that have never referred at all. That list is the plan.
Step two: decide who should be in it
Each specialty has a natural set of referring providers. We have mapped them for the specialties we serve:
- Orthopedic surgery: primary care, urgent care, physical therapy, chiropractic, emergency departments, podiatry
- Neurosurgery: neurology, pain management, physiatry, primary care
- Cardiology: primary care, internal medicine, hospitalists, endocrinology, nephrology
- Orthodontics, endodontics, periodontics and oral surgery: general and pediatric dentists, hygienists
- Ophthalmology: optometry, primary care, endocrinology
- Pain management: primary care, urgent care, chiropractic, PT, surgeons, workers comp
- Fertility: OB/GYN, primary care, urology, endocrinology
- Bariatrics: primary care, endocrinology, cardiology, sleep medicine, orthopedics
- Home health and hospice: hospital case managers, SNFs, physicians, assisted living
- Behavioral health: primary care, pediatrics, OB/GYN, hospitals, schools
Every specialty we serve has a page with the full referral source list: see all specialties.
Step three: work the network in person
A referral network is built one office at a time, face to face. A rep visits on a schedule, meets the staff who make referral decisions, brings referral criteria and a direct contact, and solves whatever is making it hard to refer to you. Relationships that are not visited fade within a year. The ones that are visited compound.
Step four: close the loop
Every referral generates a note back to the source. Every source gets thanked. Every problem a referring office raises gets fixed and the office is told it was fixed. This is the part most practices skip and the part that keeps a network sending.
Step five: measure it
Referrals by source, by month. New sources added. Sources gone quiet. Offices visited and who was seen. A referral network you can see is one you can manage.
Building it with Doctor Referral Institute
We have built doctor referral networks for specialty practices for 15 years in more than 20 states. A referral specialist maps your network, a local rep works it every week, and you get a report every week. One practice per specialty per market, so the network we build in your area is yours. Book a free evaluation and we will map your current referral base on the call.