Custom Referral Management System for a Multi-Specialty Medical Group

Overview

Built a custom referral management system for a multi-specialty medical group that was tracking incoming and outgoing patient referrals across a mix of spreadsheets and sticky notes. The system logs every referral's status from initial request through completed consult, automatically notifying staff when a referral has been sitting without action for too long. It gives group leadership a clear view of referral volume between specialties, which the group had never been able to see before. We built the system to be simple enough for front-desk staff to use without training beyond a single onboarding session. A multi-specialty medical group tracked incoming and outgoing patient referrals across a mix of spreadsheets and sticky notes, with no visibility into referral volume or bottlenecks between specialties. We built a custom referral management system logging every referral's status from initial request through completed consult, automatically notifying staff when a referral has been sitting without action too long, simple enough to use with a single onboarding session. We shadowed front-desk staff to understand how referrals were actually being tracked, and lost, in the existing sticky-note-and-spreadsheet process before designing the system. It launched with one specialty pair first to validate the alert timing, then expanded across the full multi-specialty group. Leadership now has visibility into referral bottlenecks between specialties for the first time, and the number of referrals that fell through the cracks has dropped meaningfully since staff no longer rely on sticky notes and spreadsheets.