Physician Relations: Leveraging Your Existing Referral Sources

By:?Kriss Barlow, RN, MBA?|?[email protected]?

Most liaisons are far more comfortable working with existing practices than cold calling those who have never referred. And let’s face it, in some geographies, new prospects are slim pickings.

Existing practices are the referral mainstay. Assuming this is your sweet spot, what’s your approach to earn more referrals from those already being visited? With increased pressure to make up for the financial challenges of the pandemic, leaders are interested in earning back volumes.

Liaisons have a key role in trying to speed up the process. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Learn Their Capacity to Refer More:?If a physician gives you all they have, they can’t be a growth target. But, they are a very important retention target. And, unless their practice grows exponentially, this doctor is not going to be the source of big volume growth. Liaisons can certainly help grow specialist practices through referrals from primary care, but most primary care growth will come from consumer choice. Carefully planned questions about practice capacity, ways physicians are looking to grow or stabilize will give the liaison a great sense of the potential for growth.

Understand the Split: Data provides the right context to demonstrate whether the physician splits by specialty – we get all the cardiology, but not much in orthopedics. Or they split within a specialty – the competitor and our practice share the referrals in cardiology from a specific practice. The outcome of a data review is to gain an understanding of referrals you receive and those you believe you could receive. Come away from this with a short list and clear potential.

Deep Dive Offering Review: Clinically, relationally and operationally make sure you know the capabilities of your program and the competing service. It’s important to understand whether the offerings are better at your facility, the same, or not as good. Consider that sometimes, if our facility does not offer a full continuum, it is challenging to earn referrals for a select service. Tenderly query your referring physicians to better understand this. The takeaway is that field staff need to know what they are justified in earning. Go after that first.

Set Timeframes:?We all do better when we have clear goals and timelines. Perhaps you start with three or four practices that you’ve targeted for growth in a specific service line. Set a personal growth goal that you can achieve in the next three months. Once the goals are set, create a plan to shift the referrals to your specialists and service areas.

Existing referral sources are so critical to earning new referrals that it goes without saying that the liaison will want a method to track, measure and report. Process does matter! Do you have other framework tools to accomplish this task? Please share.

If you are challenged with the items above it might be a good time for a strategy day. Our experienced team would love to offer suggestions and help in any way we can. Please just reach out to me at?[email protected]?and we can set up a time to talk.?