Referral Intake for Cerbo EHR Practices

Referrals come through more than one door

A functional or integrative medicine practice hears about referred patients in several ways. A primary care office calls to say they are sending someone. A chiropractor or therapist mentions your name to a client, who then calls on their own. A patient says their sister's doctor recommended you. Every version starts on the phone, and every version can stall there if the details are thin.

Faxed and electronic referrals keep arriving through the channels you already use. This page covers the phone side, which is where the follow-up questions usually begin.

When a referring office calls

When staff from another practice call, Katie identifies them as a professional caller and collects what your coordinator needs to act:

• The referring clinician's name, practice and direct callback number
• The patient's name and date of birth, and how best to reach the patient
• The reason for the referral, in the referring office's words
• Whether records, labs or imaging are being sent, and by what route
• How soon the referring clinician hopes the patient will be seen

When the referred patient calls

Patients who call on a clinician's suggestion follow your new-patient path, with one addition: Katie asks who sent them. That detail matters to your coordinator, who may want to request records, and to the practice's own picture of where new patients come from.

If the patient does not know what was sent, the summary says so. Your coordinator can then request records directly instead of waiting for a packet that may never arrive. Asking whether the patient is happy for the practice to contact the referring clinician makes that request straightforward.

The coordinator's next steps

The summary reaches your coordinator with everything collected. They request missing records, confirm the patient's interest and schedule the consult in Cerbo. Katie does not book it and does not call the referring office afterwards; those steps belong to your team.

Once the patient has a chart, MedReception Autopilot files the referral call summary to it from the coordinator's own signed-in browser. The record then shows how the patient came to you, which helps when the referring clinician later asks how things went.

Two checks on your intake

Pick two simple measures. How often does a coordinator have to call a referring office back for something that could have been asked the first time? And how long does it take from the first referral call to a booked consult? Both are easy to track from the summaries and your Cerbo schedule, and both tell you whether the intake questions need adjusting.