Sent Is Not Delivered
Where rural referrals break down, and how to fix the gaps.
Thank you to everyone who joined on September 24. Most rural organizations can tell you how many referrals they sent last quarter. Far fewer can tell you how many resulted in a service actually delivered. This session walked through where that gap comes from, and how to close it.
Three things to do next
Watch the recording
The full hour, including David Stewart's front-line segment and the Q&A. Worth sharing with anyone on your team who sends or receives referrals.
Watch the recording →Score your own process
The one-page readiness checklist from the session. Six questions, vendor-neutral, and fillable on screen. No sign-up.
Get the checklist →Go deeper on the five points
What fails at each of the five break points, what it looks like, and what to do about it, written out in full.
Read where referrals break down →What the session covered
The session walked through the five points where referrals break between organizations, what one rural AHEC network changed to fix it, and how to tell whether your current process, spreadsheet, or platform is closing the loop or just recording that something was sent.
What you will be able to do after watching
- Identify the five points where a referral fails between organizations, and recognize which one is failing in your own workflow.
- Describe what front-line staff need operationally, not just technically, for coordination to hold across organizational boundaries.
- Apply a requirements checklist to evaluate a current vendor, a planned purchase, or an existing manual process.
Who it is for
Community health workers, care coordinators and navigators, care coordination and population health leadership, program directors, and executive directors at FQHCs, rural health clinics, critical access hospitals, behavioral health organizations, social service agencies, community-based organizations, and local health departments.
Built for people who send or receive referrals across organizational lines, and for the leaders responsible for reporting on what happened to them.
A one-page readiness checklist you can use on Monday.
The checklist is vendor-neutral. It is written to be used against whatever you are running today, whether that is a platform, a shared spreadsheet, or a set of phone calls and follow-up emails.
Get the checklist →Use it to evaluate
- A platform you already pay for
- A purchase you are considering
- A manual process you have not questioned in a while
- A grant requirement you need to report against
Speakers
Chris Nickerson
Chief Executive Officer, WellCheckChris leads WellCheck, a public health technology company that builds closed-loop referral infrastructure for community health programs.
David Stewart
Operations Director, AHEC WestDavid oversees operations at AHEC West, which coordinates care across western Maryland and the adjoining counties of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and walked through what the network changed in its own referral process.
The full build story, in November.
AHEC West presents the complete arc at the NERHA annual conference, November 17 and 18 at the Grappone Conference Center in Concord, NH, including the parts that did not go to plan. This session was the diagnosis. That one is the build.
See the NERHA conference →
