How to Set Up a Referral Workflow in Under 10 Minutes

Ask a practice manager how referrals are handled, and you get one of two answers. The first is a clear, repeatable sequence: “arrives, gets triaged, assigned to a doctor, patient contacted the same week.” The second is a pause, and then “it depends on who’s on reception that day.”

Most specialist practices have a referral process. Far fewer have a referral workflow. A process is what happens. A workflow is the series of stages a referral passes through, each with a clear purpose, a responsible role, and a defined “done” condition. Writing that down is a ten-minute exercise, not an IT project. Here is how to do it.

The shape you’re aiming for

Some practices run five stages; some run ten. The count doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone can point to the same list and agree on what happens at each stage. If you want the tracking view of the same lifecycle rather than the operational one, the referral tracking guide covers it.

Step 1: Define your stages (2 minutes)

Write down every stage a referral passes through at your practice, from arrival to completion. Start with the eight above and adjust: an ophthalmology practice might add “Request imaging” before patient contact; a practice that doesn’t take deposits deletes stage seven; a high-volume gastroenterology practice might split “Contact patient” into a first attempt and follow-up attempts, because patients who go quiet need a different play from patients you simply haven’t rung yet.

The test is simple: pick up a random referral from your desk right now. Can you place it in exactly one stage? If it could sit in two at once, your definitions aren’t clear enough yet.

Aim for roughly five to eight stages. Fewer, and you’re lumping distinct actions together so a card can sit still while three different things happen. More, and your team spends more time updating statuses than doing the work.

Step 2: Assign roles (2 minutes)

Each stage needs an owner: a role, not a named person, so it survives leave and turnover. The graphic above shows the usual split: reception owns intake, patient contact, booking and deposits; the practice manager owns triage and doctor assignment; the doctor owns clinical review; admin owns closing the loop with the GP.

Write the role next to each stage on your own list. This is exactly the problem that surfaces at a fifteen-minute weekly referral meeting as “stuck referrals”. They are rarely stuck on difficulty. They are stuck because nobody knew it was their job.

Step 3: Decide your trigger points (2 minutes)

A workflow without prompts is just a list on a wall. Map the handovers where one role finishes and another has to start:

• New referral arrives → practice manager is prompted to triage
• Doctor assigned → doctor is prompted to review
• Doctor approves → reception is prompted to contact the patient
• Appointment booked → the patient gets a confirmation. Email is included on every SimpleRef plan; SMS is an optional add-on. Either way, what you say in that message matters more than the channel
• A referral sits at any stage past the threshold you set → practice manager is alerted

You don’t need twenty rules. You need the five or six that stop a referral sitting unnoticed, and the one that matters most is the stall alert. Every other prompt is about speed. The stall alert is the one that prevents referral leakage: the patients who drift away because nobody followed up.

Step 4: Set the views (2 minutes)

A workflow only works if the right people can see the right part of it.

Doctors should see their assigned referrals and the clinical review stage. They do not need the deposit queue or the booking confirmations. Show them everything and they stop looking. Reception needs the whole board: what’s incoming, what needs a call, what’s booked. The practice manager needs the overhead view: counts at each stage, what’s aged, and how work is distributed across doctors.

If you’re adding a team member, set their access level now. A locum covering two days a week doesn’t need the same view as your full-time specialist.

Step 5: Test with one real referral (2 minutes)

Don’t launch on a Monday morning with an inbox full of new referrals. Take one that arrived today and walk it through every stage by hand. Receive it. Assign it. Send it for review. Move it to patient contact. Make the call. Book it. Mark it complete.

Note anything that feels clunky. Did the prompt fire when you moved between stages? Was it obvious whose turn it was? Did the referral ever sit in a dead zone where nobody was cued to act? Fix those with one referral rather than discovering them with fifty. If the walk-through takes much longer than a couple of minutes, that itself is information: something in the process needs simplifying.

What you’ve actually changed

If you’ve been picturing those stages as columns with referrals as cards moving left to right, that’s the right mental model. That is what a referral board is. Its value is that it makes invisible work visible: twelve cards banked up in “Contact patient” and two in “Booked” tells you where to spend the afternoon, without scrolling a spreadsheet or asking the room.

That is also the difference between measuring and guessing. Once every referral is a card in a column, the numbers a practice manager actually needs fall out of the board rather than out of a manual count: how many are waiting, how long they’ve waited. The practice manager’s guide to referral KPIs covers which of them are worth watching weekly.

Getting started with SimpleRef

SimpleRef is built around this model: a referral board where every arriving referral sits in one column until someone moves it, with prompts at the handovers and ageing flags on the cards.

The stages themselves we set up for you. Tell us how your practice triages (the list you just wrote in step one) and we build it into your board, so you’re not handed a template designer and left to reverse-engineer your own workflow.

You can estimate what unstructured referral handling is costing you, see what’s in the product, or ask for a twenty-minute walkthrough and we’ll put your kind of referrals on the board before you commit to anything.