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Referrals are the lifeblood of specialty care. But for many clinics, the referral process is broken. Faxed referrals pile up. Staff spend hours retyping information, making phone calls, and chasing patients who may never schedule. Patients wait weeks for care, and clinics lose revenue when referrals fall through the cracks.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Most clinics still rely on fax and manual work to process referrals. Staff must read through incoming documents, enter data into the EHR, and make repeated calls to reach patients. It’s no surprise that many referrals are delayed or dropped. The result is frustrated patients, underutilized providers, and lost growth opportunities.
Instead of staff sorting faxes and making endless calls, Luma Health automates the entire referral process from intake to appointment. By combining the right building blocks, clinics can piece together a complete solution that finally fixes referrals end to end.
Here’s how it works:
From the moment a referral is received, the process moves forward automatically. Staff don’t need to chase patients, and patients get clear communication and easy scheduling.
The impact of referral automation is clear:
Referral automation delivers the most value in specialty clinics where referral volume is high and staff capacity is limited. Radiology, cardiology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, dermatology, and neurology are common examples, but the impact extends across nearly every specialty that depends on a steady flow of referred patients.
These clinics often face the same challenges: large stacks of faxed referrals, long delays before patients are contacted, and overworked staff trying to juggle outreach with other tasks. Call centers may spend hours dialing patients who never pick up, while valuable appointments go unfilled and revenue is lost.
By streamlining referrals from the moment they arrive, automation helps clinics:
Specialty clinics that depend heavily on referrals to grow, or that are already struggling with staff shortages and manual workload, will see the greatest and fastest impact.
When referrals are automated:
One customer put it plainly: “We’d need to double or triple our staff to handle faxes without Luma.”
Luma’s referral packages are quick to deploy and deliver results fast. They integrate directly with your EHR, require no custom development, and fit your clinic’s existing workflows so staff and IT are not weighed down.
If referrals are slowing down your practice, automation can turn them into a source of growth. From fax to first visit, Luma ensures patients get scheduled and staff get time back.
Want to see it in action? Schedule a personalized demo with the Luma Health team to learn how automated referral workflows can help your clinic fill schedules faster and get patients into care sooner.
Patients today expect healthcare to feel like the rest of their lives: fast, digital, and easy to use. If care is hard to access or feels confusing, patients often give up and look elsewhere.
Health systems know this. Many have invested heavily in online scheduling, digital intake, reminders, and patient messaging. Yet no-show rates remain high, referrals still get stuck in limbo, and staff often feel overwhelmed by digital backlogs.
The problem isn’t the tools themselves. The real issue is operational friction, the invisible snags in workflows, processes, and systems that stop patients from moving smoothly from interest to care.
In this post, we look at five common ways operational friction blocks patient access – and what health systems can do about it.
The problem: Many leaders think of a missed appointment as one lost slot. But the true cost goes far beyond that. When a patient ends up in the emergency department instead of seeing their primary care provider, the cost of care can be up to five times higher. Outpatient visits that could have been billed at a standard rate turn into unreimbursed ED costs. On top of that, a missed primary care visit often delays preventive care, which creates more expensive complications later.
Example: A missed $150 wellness visit may turn into an avoidable $750 urgent care or ED claim. For safety-net organizations or systems with a large Medicaid population, those dollars are rarely recouped.
The fix: Reframe the way you measure loss. It’s not only about a $150 appointment that went empty, it’s about the downstream cost of care that never happened upstream. Access teams can use this perspective to advocate for stronger referral follow-up, automated reminders, and active waitlists that fill open slots in real time.
The problem: Online scheduling is one of the most popular digital tools in healthcare. Patients love the convenience of booking an appointment from their phone.
But convenience works both ways: Patients now cancel or reschedule more often, sometimes at the last minute. Without systems that backfill these openings, providers are left with empty calendars.
This isn’t a failure of the scheduling technology itself, it’s a failure of orchestration. A scheduling tool alone can’t ensure that referrals are completed, that pre-visit tasks are done, or that outreach happens quickly enough to fill cancellations.
Example: A cardiology practice allows online booking for consults. A patient cancels the day before, leaving a 45-minute slot open. Without automation to notify waitlisted patients, that time remains empty. Multiply this across hundreds of providers and the revenue loss adds up fast.
The fix: Pair online scheduling with connected workflows. When a patient cancels, the system should immediately reach out to other eligible patients on a waitlist. When a referral is placed, it should trigger automatic scheduling outreach. When intake is incomplete, reminders should go out without staff intervention. Great patient access is about connecting the whole chain of events in the patient journey.
The problem: Health systems encouraged patients to use digital communication, and patients listened. But the volume of messages quickly outpaced staffing. Providers are now seeing 15 or more messages per hour, many of them simple questions that don’t require clinical judgment. Without clear ownership, staff scramble to respond, which leads to burnout and delayed replies.
Example: A patient sends three portal messages asking about a medication refill. Each message creates a new task in the EHR, and a provider needs to close out each duplicate encounter. Multiply this by thousands of patients and inboxes become unmanageable.
The fix: Use automation to triage and route messages intelligently. Simple questions like “what are your hours” or “how do I get to the clinic” can be answered by AI agents or automated chatbots. Requests that require staff input should be directed to the right team member, not dumped into a general inbox. This allows patients to get fast answers while protecting clinical teams from message overload.
The problem: Every unbooked referral or dead scheduling link represents a patient who already agreed to care. They were “vetted demand.” Losing them is more than lost revenue — it’s lost trust. Patients may never come back, and referring providers may stop sending patients if they feel their referrals are not being honored.
Example: A primary care provider refers a patient for a sleep study. The referral sits in a fax queue for two weeks. The patient never receives scheduling outreach and eventually gives up. That patient does not just skip the study. They may develop complications that cost more to treat. And the referring provider may stop trusting the specialty group.
The fix: Treat referrals as confirmed demand, not optional. Build workflows that automatically convert referrals into scheduled visits or immediate outreach. Track every step of the process so leaders can see how many referrals remain unbooked and where patients fall off. Closing this gap protects both revenue and reputation.
The problem: Most reporting tools in healthcare only show what happened — completed visits, checked-in patients, or survey results from people who made it through the system. They rarely show what did not happen. That means leaders can’t see how many patients tried to schedule but failed, how many referrals never turned into visits, or how many patients abandoned intake forms.
Without visibility into these “silent losses,” health systems are left guessing about what to fix.
Example: A system may see stable visit volumes and assume access is fine. In reality, hundreds of referrals may be unbooked each month, but they never show up on a dashboard. That is hidden leakage.
The fix: Expand measurement beyond completed visits. Track demand and conversion. Identify who attempted to schedule but did not finish, which referrals are still waiting, and which parts of intake forms cause drop-offs. With this visibility, leaders can prioritize improvements that directly boost access.
Access problems today are not about whether health systems have the right tools. it’s about whether those tools work together. Patients do not experience healthcare in silos, and systems should not manage access in silos either.
The most successful organizations are connecting the dots across the entire journey. They are aligning communication from referral to follow-up, automating repetitive tasks like reminders and intake, and reducing manual work by routing tasks to the right place.
Better access starts with connected systems that make it easier for patients to get care and easier for staff to deliver it.
Transitioning from MEDITECH Client Server to Expanse is a significant milestone. While it promises enhanced functionality and a modernized user experience, the migration process can be complex and resource-intensive, particularly for regional hospitals with small IT teams.
However, your transition doesn’t have to mean putting critical patient engagement initiatives on hold.
Northfield Hospital + Clinics faced this very challenge. Relying on manual calling to reach patients meant high no-show rates and scrambles to contact large groups of patients during Minnesota winter weather. Rather than waiting until their Expanse migration was complete, they made Luma part of their roadmap to Expanse — and it paid off.
When Northfield signed on with Luma, they were still operating on MEDITECH Client Server and planning a migration to Expanse. At that time, Client Server offered limited integration options, lacking the APIs available in Expanse. But for Northfield, the need for effective patient communication was too urgent to delay.
“We needed something for patient engagement. MEDITECH didn’t have a patient connect module at the time, and we were still making manual calls for almost everything,” said Debbie Oathoudt, ITS Manager at Northfield. “We live in Minnesota and weather incidents are common. Knowing that patients often don’t answer the phone, we wanted to send broadcast messages and use chat instead.”
Luma’s flexible platform allowed Northfield to implement automated reminders, broadcast messaging, and patient education campaigns while still on Client Server. When severe weather hit, they quickly notified thousands of patients using Luma’s messaging capabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Luma helped them manage outreach for vaccine appointments with ease.
Fast forward to Northfield’s go-live with Expanse, and Luma remained a trusted partner.
Integrating systems during an EHR migration can strain IT resources. However, Luma’s collaborative approach minimized the burden on Northfield’s small IT team.
“Luma makes it easy. They worked alongside us to understand what we needed to succeed,” said Oathoudt. “Luma’s integration was very clear and simple, so we were able to focus on the migration to Expanse.”
The benefits Northfield had already seen from going live with Luma on MEDITECH Client Server were crucial as they migrated to MEDITECH Expanse.
For a few weeks after going live with Expanse, Northfield paused Luma to allow staff to adjust to the new EHR – and the absence of automated patient engagement was keenly felt.
“Providers noticed the difference almost immediately,“ Oathoudt recalled. “Our no-show rates went up, and staff were calling me and asking when Luma would be back.”
Once Expanse was live and stable, Luma and Northfield worked together to relaunch and expand their use of the platform. With the Expanse APIs in place, Northfield unlocked even more powerful capabilities, including empowering patients to self-schedule their appointments at Northfield locations from Northfield’s website, patient’s mobile device or even a Google search.
Northfield’s Customer Success Manager at Luma, Luis Hernandez, emphasized the importance of partnership. “The Northfield team have been true collaborators. As soon as Expanse was up and running, they were ready to leverage the Expanse APIs to further improve their patient experience.”
Oathoudt adds, “We try to be innovative and give our local community a best-in-class experience. Luma has partnered with us to do that, from our Client Server days to now using Expanse.”
If your organization is planning a migration to MEDITECH Expanse, there’s no need to wait to solve patient engagement challenges. Partnering with Luma before, during, and after your transition means you can:
Let Luma help you maximize the value of your EHR transition. Get in touch with us today to learn how we can support your journey.