How to Set Up Your Referral Network

In the third episode of Practice Matters, Payal Kohli, MD, founder of Cherry Creek Heart in Denver, discusses how to set up a new referral network and earn the trust of other local physicians. Kohli also is the medical expert for 9News/Daily Blast Live.

The following is a transcript of her remarks:

I’m Dr. Payal Kohli, founder and medical director of Cherry Creek Heart in Denver, Colorado. I’m really excited to talk to you today about how you can start to set up your referral network. This is probably one of the most exciting things you’ll do as a new practice owner, so let’s dive right in and see what you can do to get things going.

When you’re in private practice, having a referral system is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure of your practice. It’s literally the hand that feeds your mouth, so you want to be sure to curate this early on and you want to do it in a way that really allows you to continue to grow it effectively.

Broadly speaking, I sort of think of your referral network as who sends patients to you, and who you send patients to. You want many of those lines to be going sort of bidirectionally. You also want the lines to start to connect with each other, because that’s a really nice way to have your patients see the same set of providers. It also makes your life a little bit easier if you’re trying to communicate with a kidney doctor and a heart surgeon and a neurologist and all the other specialists that you’re working with.

It’s really important over time, as your practice grows, that you start to iterate and change your referral network as well. Because it’s possible that you add a new service line, for example, I recently started putting in loop recorders and that is a service line that is closely affiliated with neurology. Once I started that service line, I spent a huge effort really curating the neurologists that I had been working with and helping to grow my network that way as well.

I would say the easiest starting point is to pick a practice location that is on a campus of another hospital. I recently moved my practice from an independent, self-standing building to a hospital medical campus where there are lots and lots of other medical buildings. Literally, my referral network is right at my doorstep because there’s all these other providers that are in the same building. The nephrologist is above me, the lab is next to me, the dialysis center is right across the street.

That is an easy way to get an instant referral network, affiliating yourself with the hospital system. Their physicians’ relations people, as part of your onboarding, will actually take you door-to-door to your practices to help introduce you, to welcome you to the campus, and to show all the other specialists and referrers that you’re there so that they can start sending business to you. That’s nice and easy.

A little harder would be the things that you have to do. I called my insurance companies when I was starting out way back in the pandemic, and I said ‘Who are the other providers that are in your network? Because I’m in your network. Who are the nephrologists and the neurologists and the primary cares and all the other ones that would refer to me as a cardiologist, and how do I contact them?’ And so using a zip code, and using the other providers in network with the same insurances that you take, you’ve already created an instant set of patients that could potentially be your pipeline.

Now once you’ve established who those people are that are in your network, you can’t just expect them to send patients to you. You actually have to go to their office, introduce yourself, do a little face time, share your cell phone number, give them your card, make yourself affable and available so that those providers do feel comfortable sending patients to you, because they’re not going to send to a name; they’re going to send to a person. You have to go and introduce yourself and show them who you are.

The next thing you can do is use social media. This is really effective because there are a lot of physicians groups that are on social media, there are a lot of subspecialty groups on social media, there are networks like LinkedIn and Doximity where you can filter by geographic location and, again, start to see who are some of the doctors that are in your geographical area, because that’s where your patients are going to want to be seen. If they’re already being seen there, they’re more likely to be seen there as well.

Now one thing you don’t want to do is try to really solicit doctors that are owned by hospitals, because a lot of hospitals own practices and generally their doctors are, I wouldn’t say required, but strongly encouraged to refer to the hospital itself. That’ll be a harder thing to break into is to try to get them to change the referral pattern if they’re already obligated to refer to a hospital rather than referring to an individual private practice.

You know, I would say a couple things — affable, available, and really, really capable — those are the three things you need to do in private practice. If somebody does send you a patient, make sure you close that loop, because the last thing you want to do is your note never got back to your referral, you never closed the loop with them. So whether it’s a text message or making sure that your office faxed the note back to them, make sure that you close the loop with them.

Be kind to their patients, because what a lot of my referrers do is they pilot with a couple of patients. They send me a few, they see how I do with them, and then they decide if they’re going to send me more. So make sure that you’re on your best behavior for those first few patients at least, hopefully for all of them, but really make sure that you deliver on the promises that you’ve made when you’ve gone and talked to the doctor.

Make sure that, like I said, you share your cell phone and you’re available for curb sides, because a lot of times primary care providers or someone in another specialty may just need to run something by you. If you’re able to interact with them and show them that you care and that you’re available to them, not just for the patient but also just for them as a system of support, then they really do start to trust you.

Then finally, I would say make sure that you’re evaluating the process. What I like to do is after I’ve set up my referral network, once a year or anytime I add a new service line, I like to go back to that office and see how things are going. Check in with the providers there and see if anything could be done better, whether it’s the speed of referrals, how quickly you’ll get them in, whether it’s the communication back, whether it’s the services that you’re providing, anything else that their office might need that you may actually be able to provide. That’s really very helpful.

So if you do all of those things and really position yourself in a way that people want to send you patients; they are dying to find good doctors that they can send their patients to, and that’s really something I think that you can capitalize on as you start to build your practice.

Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Practice Matters. Be sure to join us next time as we go over more tips and tricks that you can use as you’re building your private practice from the ground up. We hope you learned something today about starting your referral network, and this is the most exciting part. So good luck to you, and we’ll see you again next time.

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