Leveraging referrals with MatrixCare for home health and hospice

By leveraging electronic referrals with digital tools built to streamline a once tedious process for home health and hospice providers, MatrixCare is dedicated to improving referral methods and referral source relationships. Here, we explore a few ways MatrixCare simplifies accepting referrals and tracks referral metrics for ongoing improvement.

Accepting electronic referrals with MatrixCare

Direct secure message with a CCD

Bringing in referrals with a direct secure message via a CCD allows providers to import data with ease. Patient demographics, contacts, medications, diagnosis codes, allergies, etc. — discreet data can be attached to existing patient records, new admissions or encounters for referrals. Other care-related documents can also be attached from the direct secure message.

Third-party systems

Whether it’s a flat file or HL7 file, referrals can easily be imported into our system via third-party integrations and attached to the patient record. Third-party enterprises can also be searched for patient data, so that if a manual referral comes in, a pre-existing patient record can be imported and attached to the new admission.

CommonWell Health Alliance integration

In addition to CCDs and third-party systems, referral information can also be searched within the CommonWell Health Alliance database — a health data exchange built to improve care coordination between providers across the nation. Regardless of where that referral comes from, CommonWell can be searched for any additional documents or data posted by other healthcare systems and then imported easily into MatrixCare for a more complete patient record.

Analyzing referrals with MatrixCare

It can be costly for organizations to spend time on patients that aren’t being admitted, which is why it’s important to track these metrics. Whether by business unit, time range, referral source, or a variety of other factors, providers can get insight into what referrals are coming in, how many referrals are being admitted, the conversion rates, and so much more. What are your referral trends? What can you be doing differently? Where can you improve?

By understanding your referral rate, providers can get a granular view of which referrals are helping their business grow and which ones are causing downward trends.