Background
Why did Baptist Memorial Decide to Make a Change?
The Referral Center at Baptist Memorial was looking for a comprehensive referral management platform that would integrate with Epic and replace their previous referral system. The Referral Center, with 52 FTE coordinators, needed a platform to manage outbound referrals across the organization. The platform needed to track their waitlist, patient interactions, and workflow and automatically close the feedback loop with their referring providers. Management also needed automated reports and the ability to manage their referral partner network.
Objectives
Decrease Time to Process Referrals
With ReferralMD’s outbound referrals work queue, Baptist Memorial could better organize and visualize the referrals that needed to be processed. The integration with their Epic EHR allows referral orders to flow seamlessly into ReferralMD so the referral coordinators can process them in a timely manner. Also, the customized alerts help referral coordinators stay on top of their respective queues by notifying them when referrals need attention. As a result, Baptist Memorial decreased the time to process referrals by 33% when comparing FY2023 with FY2024.
Decrease Time to Schedule Appointments
Baptist Memorial decreased the time between sending referrals and scheduling patient appointments with specialists, resulting in faster access to necessary medical services. By implementing ReferralMD, the coordinators were alerted when referrals were not scheduled within specified timeframes or if the wait times for appointments were longer than expected. As a result, Baptist Memorial decreased the time between sending referrals and scheduling appointments with specialists by 98% when comparing FY2023 with FY2024.
Increase Productivity per Referral Coordinator
By streamlining its referral process with ReferralMD, Baptist Memorial was able to process more outbound referrals and increase productivity per referral coordinator. ReferralMD allows coordinators to personalize their referral work queues, enabling them to tailor the interface to their specific needs. In addition, automation with ReferralMD reduces the number of manual steps in the process, including automated waitlists and communication with patients and providers. As a result, Baptist Memorial increased the number of referrals processed per coordinator by 11.5% when comparing FY2023 with FY2024.
Baptist Memorial Health Care is one of the country’s largest not-for-profit healthcare systems and the largest provider of Medicaid in the region. Baptist offers a full continuum of care to communities throughout the Mid-South and consistently ranks among the top integrated healthcare networks in the nation. More than 600 specialists and primary care providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, etc.) offer patients local and regional healthcare options across more than 30 specialties, including cardiology, pediatrics, oncology, orthopedics, internal medicine, and many more. To learn more about Baptist, go to
Working with the ReferralMD platform and team has been an excellent experience. ReferralMD as a processing system is highly customizable from notifications to the patients to reporting visuals that are shared throughout our organization. As a team, ReferralMD leadership and support staff are very responsive to questions or concerns we may have. Having ReferralMD as our referral-processing platform has enabled our department to increase our output volume by 11.5% from FY23 to FY24 YTD with the same number of personnel. Having the ability to add and update referring and receiving providers, locations and organizations at our department level greatly reduces the delay in care for our patients.