Referral Conversion Rate KPI

Referrals that don’t convert represent lost opportunities, meaning you’re leaving money on the table. The referral conversion rate quantifies how many referrals actually materialize into billable services. This percent is a quick way to see how effective you are at converting referrals into patients.

Click on this chart to open the By Clinic comparison chart for Referral Conversion Rate. You’ll be able to see a breakdown of this data by clinic, view a data table containing the calculation values, and export the results.

Calculation

Converted Referrals: This represents the number of patients referred, who also have a finalized initial evaluation in their case. This is based on the Referral Received Date in the patient case. If there is no date present, this defaults to the case creation date.

Total Referrals: This is the total number of referrals, as determined by the number of created cases. This data is based on the Referral Received Date. If this field is blank, it defaults to the case creation date.

Referral Conversion Rate: the percent of referrals who actually become patients, as tracked through patient cases, and finalized initial evaluations.

These figures include finalized notes for both SOAP 1.0 and 2.0 Data.

Strategies for Management

For every referral that comes to therapy, there are many more who never attend. Just review the number of referrals you receive who don’t convert. We’ve included a few strategies to help improve this metric.

Manage Your Referral Sources

Not all referral sources are equal. How do your referral partners measure up? What are you doing to develop and maintain those relationships? Do you have a referral marketing strategy in place?

Getting Quality Referrals from Physicians

Develop a strategy that communicates how you and your clinic are going to make the physician’s patients better, faster.
Understand the types of patients that the doctor sees. This will help you communicate how you can help their patients with their goals.
Show your referring physicians that their patients are getting better by following up periodically.

Market Directly to Patients

With direct access laws, leveraging a patient-focused marketing plan could be highly effective in organically driving new patients to your clinic.
Consider social media campaigns or sponsoring local events focused on activities such as 5ks and fun runs.
Beef up your local online presence by asking your happy patients to leave online reviews. Automate this process with WebPT Reach.

And remember, whatever avenue you choose, you’ll benefit from leveraging the contact manager to create marketing referral sources in the EMR and add them to patient cases. This will allow you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns over time.

Data Requirements

There are a few things you should keep in mind regarding the data that makes up the referral conversion numbers. To be a part of the reporting, all of the following must be true:

Patient Status must be active or discharged. (Inactive patients are not included.)
Case Status must be active or discharged. (Inactive cases are not included.)
Primary Physician Status must be active. (Inactive physicians are not included.)
To count towards total referrals, the Case Creation Date (or Referral Received Date) must occur within the given date range.
Each patient case counts as one referral. (E.g., a patient with a referral for PT and OT would have two records—one for PT and one for OT—and would count as two referrals.)
The referral only counts towards the first referring physician listed. It will not include the second or third referring physicians for a case. Additionally, as mentioned above, it will exclude all physicians with an inactive status.

Clinic Versus Company Data

All referrals will show up at the organization level. However, you must add the Primary Treatment Clinic to the case to attribute the referral to the correct clinic. To make this easier, we recommend turning on the Required Primary Treatment Clinic setting. This ensures that all cases will be accurately attributed to the correct clinic and eliminate unassigned data from the Referrals by Clinic data table.

Data Best Practices

Follow the link for all recommended Analytics Data Collection Best Practices.

Include the Referral Received Date on each patient case
Collect Referring Physician or Marketing Referral information for every case
Turn on the Primary Treatment Clinic Setting to ensure that this field automatically populates when creating the patient case