Physician Referral Services are valuable resources for patients. When patients call the referral service, they are seeking assistance and will receive a referral to a specific physician or facility. When managed and administered properly, referral services can also be highly profitable for the health care organization itself and strengthen physicians’ practices.

The bottom line is that patients who use a referral service tend to generate more than double the amount of revenue in hospital charges. Look at referral services as an investment in the growth of your healthcare system. Patients using referral services to make their appointments have a higher rate of scheduled appointments, are more loyal, and generate higher hospital charges than those who do not use the service.* In fact, healthcare organizations using Edcor’s referral service realized a 450% return on this investment.

EFFECTIVE PHYSICIAN REFERRAL SERVICES HELP TO Improve patient and physician loyalty Increase patient retention Reduce staffing expense Increase the number of scheduled appointments Generate increased revenue

Handling thousands of calls monthly, Edcor provides healthcare systems and physicians with professional contact management services. This allows healthcare systems to manage their referrals, grow their business practice, improve brand awareness and increase physician/patient loyalty. Our dedicated, compassionate and highly trained team of healthcare call center professionals provides a level of sophistication that is unmatched in the industry. Being ISO certified and HIPAA compliant, we understand and respect the security and privacy of healthcare data and patients’ rights. Edcor is committed to the rigorous protection of the information and data it manages.

In addition to referral call center services, Edcor provides appointment scheduling, reporting and data analysis, web and database updates, class scheduling and cross-selling of wellness and other programs. Trained specifically to meet customer’s needs, Edcor call center specialists are able to recommend enrolling in a healthy heart or diabetes management class in addition to scheduling appointments. Much more than just a call center, our closed-loop follow-up process ensures a high rate of appointment scheduling.

First impressions are lasting, and the impression made during a patient’s first call is likely to determine his or her overall opinion of your healthcare organization. In the competitive healthcare industry, a professionally managed referral service can protect and improve brand equity.

At Edcor, we look at our Physician Referral Services as a valuable resource to help our clients build a comprehensive healthcare database-not just simple data, but a true relational database consisting of all the necessary information to help them successfully manage patient relationships. This database will tell our clients who their most loyal patients are, whether their marketing efforts are successful, what the ROI of their marketing programs is and how much revenue is generated from their direct mail campaigns. Using our Program Performance Analysis, we will help our clients measure the impact and ROI of their referral services.

* “The Call Center as a Marketing Channel”, a report from Solucient, LLC, December 2002.