All home health agencies know that hospital discharge planners make lots of referrals. Interestingly, some home health administrators are convinced that doctors don’t make referrals. How many referrals should an agency be getting from doctors? Here’s the definitive answer from MedPac’s 2018 report to the Congress on Medicare payment policy. MedPac reports that 66% of Medicare home health episodes were not preceded by a hospitalization. If two-thirds of your Medicare referrals are not coming from doctors, it’s possible that your agency is missing out on the biggest source of home health referrals.

How to Increase Referrals from Doctors

Home health agencies can improve their physician referral base with this simple eight-step plan:

  1. Build Name Recognition: They won’t refer to you if they’ve never heard of your agency.
  2. Build Trust: Just because they know your agency exists doesn’t mean they will trust you with a patient.
  3. Teach Your Value Proposition: Once doctors recognize your agency and feel like it’s basically trustworthy, they still need a reason to refer to your agency over all the others.
  4. Close a Sale: Get the referral
  5. Ensure Satisfaction with Service: Make sure the doctor hears about the positive outcomes your agency created for his or her patient. Don’t bury your success story in loads of data. Focus on the win you created through their referral. Ask the doctor if he or she was satisfied with the service and clinical outcomes, and if there is anything you could do better.
  6. Educate About Additional Services  
  7. Maintain Top-of-Mind Awareness: Make sure that when doctors recognize a certain need, that your agency name will pop into their heads. This requires consistent, unending repetition of your key messages. Using sales techniques to do this has a risk of backfiring. Include strategies that transcend selling. 
  8. Continue Teaching Value Propositions to Maintain Loyalty

 

Help Increasing Referrals from Doctors

Brazzell Marketing Agency’s Referral Doubling Strategy for Home Health addresses six of the steps above. We start with a consultation to assess the agency’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. If your agency does not already have clearly defined value propositions, we use our two decades of home health marketing experience to help define and articulate your agency’s positioning strategy and comparative advantages. Then we implement a communications strategy designed to walk agencies through most of the steps above.