As a specialist, the vast majority of your patients come from referrals. There are two reasons for this. Either a patient’s insurance provider requires a referral from a general practitioner, or a primary care provider notices a patient’s need for a specialist. 

Either way, that first appointment is almost always because of a referring physician, so you must capture the attention and trust of those in your area. 

With all this in mind, this is how to improve patient referrals to your orthopaedic practice in seven steps.

1. Foster Relationships With Referring Physicians

When a physician refers a patient to another practice, they want to ensure it’s one they can trust to provide a high standard of care as their credibility depends on it.

Proving that your practice will provide a high quality of care starts with: 

  • Ensuring open communication between your practice and referring physicians
  • Periodically following up about their patient’s condition
  • Taking detailed visit summary notes for a referring physician to reference later on
  • An explanation of the next steps in a patient’s treatment
  • Ensuring that a patient’s insurance needs are taken into account, especially in cases where prior authorization for services or procedures are required (for example, Medicaid often requires prior authorization for physical therapy)

Even if a referral coordinator is the one who sets up a referral, physicians can make the final decision and one who trusts you will make sure their patient is seen at your practice.

Note: A high rate of Medicare claim acceptance is another important part of a good relationship, especially with primary care providers who have a decent number of Medicare patients. Get your Medicare filing process in order, then show referring physicians your ability to care for these patients physically and financially.

2. Break Down the Data

It’s easy to run a report and determine where your referrals are coming from. Having this kind of data can help you understand what practices you have strong relationships with and those you need to work on. 

You can use this information to help shape your referral efforts. For example, consider reaching out to the providers who rarely refer to your practice and ask what it is that turned them away. Start with: 

  • Whether your office did not communicate with them in a timely or comprehensive manner
  • If something was missing from your reports that made their filing efforts more difficult
  • How working with your practice is frustrating
  • What your practice can do to improve its standard of care

Reaching out for this firsthand information, acknowledging your willingness to improve, and admitting any fault is a great way to improve your day-to-day operations and capture the attention of potential referrers.

3. Advertise Your Specializations

A large percentage of orthopaedic patients start physical therapy because of a workplace injury. However, not all orthopaedic practices accept workers’ comp insurance and do not specialize in occupational care.

At the same time, doctors and employers are always on the lookout for practices that have demonstrated their ability to provide the care needed to get work comp patients back to work as quickly as possible.

To improve workers’ comp patients to your orthopaedic practice, you have to demonstrate your effectiveness as a rehabilitation provider. 

Start by accessing the progress of current workers’ comp patients. Determine the progress they have made over time, analyze each patient for how quickly they improve, when they are not progressing or are plateauing, and what kinds of recommendations you have made for those patients who are not progressing as planned.

Then, show this information in some tangible way, such as Functional Progress Notes or a Return To Work Progress line graph. Do this for several patients to demonstrate the overall efficacy of your workers’ rehabilitation efforts.

Advertise that efficacy to general practitioners in the area, online, and consider registering with a workers’ comp organization so that people looking for workers’ comp specialists can find your practice.

4. Monitor Your Online Presence

Review sites and social media influence your relationships with referring physicians and potential patients. In fact, over 90% of patients always or sometimes read online reviews of practices to validate a referring physician’s recommendation. So, if your practice has poor reviews, referring physicians likely won’t risk their own credibility by sending patients to you.

What can you do to improve your practice’s online presence, whether you have all great reviews or you get some bad ones?

  1. Monitor review sites like Google and Yelp, and on social media platforms like Facebook
  2. Respond to all patient reviews, either by thanking them for their review or by apologizing and working to resolve their issue
  3. Choose positive reviews to display on your practice’s website
  4. Ask existing patients to give a positive testimonial

Testimonials can help your practice increase its online credibility and give referring physicians the positive information they need to send their patients to you.

5. Join Community Organizations and Volunteer

You can’t rely on just research to improve patient referrals to your orthopaedic practice, so get out there and network.

  • Go to conferences or join local organizations. This will get you in front of many referring physicians from which you can start building relationships. 
  • Join public health organizations. Nonprofits, hospital fundraising committees, or the Chamber of Commerce will help you network with physicians in related areas.
  • Volunteer at community events. This is a great way to build a positive public perception and give back to the community. 

6. Differentiate Your Practice

Adding a personal touch to your practice’s referral outreach efforts will help get referrals in. Your differentiation efforts might look like this:

  • Say thanks. Periodically sending thank-you notes to referring physicians, along with a small gift. Consider making the gifts personalized like from a favorite restaurant or bakery. 
  • Be personal. Showing an interest in a referring physician’s personal life when sending thank you notes or emails (e.g. “Thank you…P.S. how does your daughter like it at Princeton?”)
  • Beyond the practice. Taking referring physicians to lunch or even inviting them over for a homemade meal.

All these small personalized actions make all the difference in the world, especially among smaller practices that do not have the big budget for huge marketing efforts.

7. Be Efficient

Busy physicians prefer to work with specialists who are efficient in their patient intake, visit reports, treatment plans, and overall patient care process. It ensures that your practice has the ability to take care of patients in a timely manner and that everything will be diligently recorded. 

That’s why everyone in your orthopaedic practice should strive to be efficient in every area, from record-keeping to insurance claim approvals and denial appeals.

Increase Your Orthopaedic Practice’s Efficiency With SelectOrtho

SelectOrtho is a DME program management provider that offers optimized DME supply-chain management, claims submissions and appeals, compliance reports and reviews, and proprietary DME reporting software. This software will help you notice and act on inefficiencies in your DME billing and collections process increasing your collection rate above 95%.

With SelectOrtho, you can focus more on building patient and referring physician relationships, instead of filing paperwork, looking up medical codes, and trying to fix mistakes.

IMPROVE PATIENT REFERRALS