Bringing referral harmony to the Music City with Nashville Skin and LeadingReach

Prior to LeadingReach, Nashville Skin managed its referrals through its electronic medical record (EMR) system. The referral processing was fairly bare-bones when Seeman started. “When I started at Nashville Skin, the two biggest challenges on patient scheduling were that (1) we didn’t have enough people to answer the phone, so patients were calling us back, reaching voicemail, and not leaving messages, and (2) we didn’t have a solid referral process as far as following up and getting patients scheduled,” says Seeman.

“We didn’t even have medical schedulers,” Seeman continues. “So our front desk assistants would come across these referrals for consultations and they would try to reach the patient one time. Hopefully, fingers crossed, they would call us back. If not, that was it.”

According to Seeman, this one-call referral system was completely lacking in any follow-up or accountability. “We would have a chart in the EMR, and a pop-up note would come up. ‘Referral from Dr. Beck’s office on this date. Left voicemail.’ It was that basic, and then it was forgotten. And there was no responsibility or accountability for the employee to follow through. We weren’t using a spreadsheet of referrals or any kind of central referral database.”

This resulted in a fairly low proportion of referrals that were actually scheduled. “I would say it was a 30% scheduling rate on a one-phone call referral, at best,” Seeman says. “We were missing out on thousands and thousands of dollars in patients, because we weren’t following up with referrals to continue to grow the practice. We were really missing opportunities with these patients by only calling them once.”

Seeman said the value of LeadingReach was apparent in several ways. “I saw the value of being able to track referrals through a multiple-contact process. And from a business-to-business standpoint, it was great that other practices could log onto LeadingReach and see exactly where their patient is in the process.”

Although he looked into other referral management solutions, Seeman was sold on LeadingReach by the fact that the larger healthcare organizations in Nashville were already using the platform. “It was validation. It just made sense to go with a company that these larger organizations were trusting.”

Seeman had to convince the partner owners at Nashville Skin to implement LeadingReach, he says this was not a hard sell. While the practice’s growth was impressive, Seeman’s case was that Nashville Skin was missing out on even more growth by not having a tool to help their referral management become more efficient.

With the LeadingReach implementation, Nashville Skin was able to establish a central call center/medical scheduling department to handle the practice’s high call volume. With 3 employees in charge of patient scheduling, the call center team looks at the LeadingReach platform daily to ensure they are regularly contacting referred patients and referring providers.

Halie Mesler, the call center team lead, can list off her favorite features from the LeadingReach platform. “We have the ability to track the referrals and see how many times we’ve contacted them,” says Mesler. “And on the custom statuses, I like how we can add different statuses based on different interactions with patients. For example, we have a lot of Spanish-speaking clients, so we can note that we need a Spanish speaker to call them to schedule. We can note if we spoke to the patient, if they agreed to call back later, or if they declined service for now.“

“And when practices call to ask if a patient has been scheduled,” continues Mesler, “it’s easy to go on LeadingReach and respond quickly. ‘We’ve contacted them twice, they haven’t called us back, but we can try again today,’ or whatever the case may be.”

With this enhanced referral tracking and follow-up through LeadingReach, it is little surprise the practice is converting more referrals into scheduled appointments. Nashville Skin’s referral-to- appointment (RTA) ratio has gone up drastically from Seeman’s pre-LeadingReach estimate of 30%, with their RTA recently reaching as high as 86%. “It’s just amazing to be able to show that result to the partners,” says Seeman.

The call center was another key benefit enabled by LeadingReach. Seeman says the practice had long wanted to start such a center, but they were unsure of how to start. Without a tool like LeadingReach, they had few alternatives.

“Our other option was building an Excel spreadsheet to handle the referrals,” says Seeman. “But then you don’t have the flexibility of LeadingReach. You don’t have the ability to run reports quickly. You don’t have communication through one central website where everyone can log in. You don’t have the ability to give all users one central referral database that everyone is working off of. We needed LeadingReach for all of that.”

Seeman also gives high ratings to LeadingReach’s representatives and support team. “When we first started using LeadingReach, we might accidentally lock ourselves out of the system. Literally within 5 minutes, LeadingReach support would have us unlocked and ready to go. And the LeadingReach reps are great, never pushy, they just provide the information and say how it could help you. Most reps are not like that.”

LeadingReach essentially served as the central tool for the referral process Seeman designed. “I built everything around LeadingReach, such as callback times or what our procedures would be,” says Seeman. “It allowed us to build a protocol around referrals. From an operational standpoint, it increased our efficiency and ability to track referrals across all our locations. The platform has been a launching pad for our further growth.”