Background
Orthopaedic Associates runs seven locations and five subspecialties on eClinicalWorks (eCW). About 400 insurance referrals arrive each month, almost all by fax. For years, one person handled them: Rosy Cortez, the referral coordinator, working alongside Practice Manager Paige Glass, who oversees daily operations across the practice. The practice built each patient’s chart in eCW by hand before a patient could even get a call, then tracked every referral’s status by hand on a spreadsheet.
The Challenge
Every referral meant two manual jobs before Rosy could make a call:
- Building the patient’s chart in eCW by hand: 8 to 10 minutes.
- Entering the same referral in Excel, on a separate tab for each of the practice’s 10 providers: about 2 more minutes.
With roughly 400 referrals a month, that added up to 65 to 80 hours of data entry. A first call could take 48 to 72 hours. The patients weren’t hard to reach. The paperwork just hadn’t caught up.
The spreadsheet created a quieter problem too. When a patient said no one had called, the team couldn’t prove otherwise. Unanswered calls lived in a trail that was hard to search and easy to lose. Physicians stayed fully booked, but they worried about referrals no one could account for. Had the patient been reached, was the referral still being worked, or had it slipped?
Solution
Since May 2026, Orthopaedic Associates has managed referrals in LeadingReach, integrated with eCW. The integration includes Fax Automation, Chart Creation, and Appointment Sync. Referrals no longer sit in a spreadsheet or wait on a manual chart build: once a fax is assigned, reviewed, and approved, the chart is ready, no typing required. The work happens right in their EHR, so the Excel spreadsheet is gone. By the time Rosy picks up the phone, the chart is ready.
What changed for the team:
- Fax Automation extracts the referral details from each incoming fax, so no one retypes them.
- Chart Creation builds or updates the patient’s chart in eCW once the referral is approved.
- The Excel spreadsheet is gone. Referral status lives in one place, visible to the whole practice.
- Provider teams can log in, filter their own referrals, and follow up alongside Rosy.
Results
Orthopaedic Associates has been live for about five months, and the early numbers are clear:
70%
of active prep time saved per referral
45-60 hrs
time saved per month
on referral prep
48-72 hrs → same/next day
turnaround time for
first patient contact
For patients, that means a call within a day instead of a wait of up to three.
The physicians have noticed the efficiency gained. Their teams now check referral status in LeadingReach instead of digging through the chart in eCW. According to Practice Manager Paige Glass, the worry about missed referrals has faded, which she and Rosy read as growing trust that nothing is slipping through.
And for the staff, Rosy says it best: “It saves me so much time. When everything is working well, it makes my life so much easier.”
“The ratio of patients that get referred to actually turning into appointments increased dramatically for us.”
— Paige Glass, Practice Manager, Orthopaedic Associates
What’s Next
Chart Creation alone is giving the team back an estimated 45 to 60 hours a month. Orthopaedic Associates plans to put that time into patient outreach and care coordination.
The practice is also building toward a full year on LeadingReach. By then, the team plans to track scheduling volume, referral-to-appointment conversion, and the dollar value of time returned to staff. Next year the team can show not only how much faster the process is, but how much more it’s worth.