Five things every imaging center should know about referrals.
1. Doctors don’t want stacks of your advertising in their office. When you drop off your brochures, they are likely to be shoved into a drawer, or more likely, thrown away very quickly after you leave. Fact: There is nothing more obnoxious than dropping off 50 of your business cards and brochures and then taking only one of theirs.
2. Office workers could not care less where a patient is sent for a scan. They are only interested in faxing the doctor’s orders and moving on to the next task. Therefore, it’s important to make the process of sending the prescription as simple as possible.
3. Doctors want compliant patients. Doctors don’t write radiology prescriptions for the fun of it. If a doctor writes a prescription for an MRI, he expects the patient to actually get the MRI. Many doctors simply hand a prescription to a patient, and hope for the best. Making it the patient’s responsibility to make the appointment is very unreliable and could cost a patient her life.
4. Doctors office workers want to do radiology referrals quickly and accurately. A referral system that saves an office worker time, means that that office worker can get other work done.
5. Office workers don’t have time to be fielding phone calls from imaging centers asking questions about claim numbers and patient information. Once the prescription is sent, all necessary information should be included, so the only thing that the imaging center has to do is schedule the patient.
After many requests and months of coding, the latest edition of RxPortal DeskTop is nearly available. Soon, prescriptions will be sent from the doctor’s office using a much improved simple desktop solution: It's as simple as the doctor’s office logging in. Once in, the referring office sees your company imaging prescription pad, and can send the Rx quickly and securely, to your imaging center’s Fax and Email without leaving the chair. Dr. A. Himmel, RxPortyl Solutions, LLC
