Nashville Skin
One Call Wasn’t Enough
How Nashville Skin replaced a best-guess referral process with one built on accountability and tripled its scheduling rate
The Challenge: A one-call referral system with no follow-up and no accountability
Nashville Skin had built a strong reputation in the Nashville area since 2005. With nationally regarded dermatologists and schedules that stayed full, the practice was thriving by most measures. But when Jason Seeman joined as Operations Manager in 2018, he could see something the full calendars were obscuring: a referral process that was quietly costing the practice real revenue.
The problem came down to accountability. Without dedicated medical schedulers, referred patients were handed to front desk staff who could make one attempt and little more. If the patient didn’t call back, that was the end of it.
“We didn’t even have medical schedulers. 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.”
— Jason Seeman, Operations Manager
What passed for a system inside the EHR left no room for follow-through. A note would appear, a voicemail would be logged, and the referral would quietly disappear.
“We would have a chart in the EHR, 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.”
— Jason Seeman
The math wasn’t hard to run. A one-call process was producing a 30% referral-to-appointment rate, and with it, a steady drain of patients the practice never had a real chance to schedule.
“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.”
— Jason Seeman
Seeman knew the practice could do better. The question was how to build a process that would actually hold.
The Solution: A referral protocol built on accountability, powered by LeadingReach
When a LeadingReach representative reached out offering a free trial, Seeman took them up on it. The verdict came quickly: “After we started using it, we could tell we definitely needed this tool.”
What made the decision straightforward was knowing that larger Nashville-area health systems were already on the platform. “It was validation. It just made sense to go with a company that these larger organizations were trusting,” Seeman said.
With LeadingReach as the backbone, Nashville Skin built something it had long wanted but never had the infrastructure to support: a dedicated call center staffed by three people whose sole focus was referral management. Halie Mesler, the call center team lead, works in the platform every day and relies on its custom status system to manage the full range of what follow-up actually looks like.
“We have the ability to track the referrals and see how many times we’ve contacted them. 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.”
— Halie Mesler, Call Center Team Lead
The platform also gave referring offices something they hadn’t had before: real-time visibility into where each patient stood, without a phone call to find out.
“When practices call to ask if a patient has been scheduled, 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.”
— Halie Mesler
The Results: From 30% to 86%, and a launchpad for what’s next
With a dedicated call center, multi-contact follow-up protocols, and full referral visibility across locations, Nashville Skin’s numbers tell the story.
30%
referral-to-appointment rate
86%
referral-to-appointment rate
“It’s just amazing to be able to show that result to the partners.”
— Jason Seeman
3-touch follow-up protocol · contacts made within the first 7–10 days · custom status tracking across every location
The discipline shows up in the staff’s day-to-day. Every referral gets a systematic review. Every patient sitting in second-call status gets a third attempt within 48 hours. The goal is three contacts in the first seven to ten days, and the platform makes every step of it trackable and visible across every location.
The referral-to-appointment rate went from 30% to 86%. For Seeman, the ability to put that number in front of the partners was its own kind of milestone. The alternative would have been a spreadsheet. Seeman is clear about what that would have meant.
“Our other option was building an Excel spreadsheet to handle the referrals. 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.”
— Jason Seemn
For Nashville Skin, LeadingReach is no longer just a referral tool. It’s the platform their growth is built on.