RE: Question re: Physician Referral for Outpatient Services

January 16, 2011

Hi Dianne,

My criteria has been as low as 6 referrals/year to classify a physician as a

'regular' referral source.

However, being a small, low volume clinic this is a reasonable number for me

since our maximum

number of referrals from our top referring physician may only reach 10. This

is based on a population

of 248 new patients in 2010. You may be looking for a percentage of your

total new patient population.

Good luck with the topic! Will you be taking into consideration patient self

referrals? They're 18% of

our new patients.

Best wishes,

Elmer Platz, PT

Vernon, NJ/Warwick, NY

From: PTManager [mailto:PTManager ] On Behalf

Of diannejewell

Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 11:20 AM

Subject: Question re: Physician Referral for Outpatient Services

Greetings. For those of you that own or manage outpatient PT/OT/SLP

services...

I'm supervising a student research project that is looking at physician

referral patterns. We want to develop a referral rate eligibility criterion

for determining which physicians in our data set to include in the analysis.

There is no evidence on this topic, so I'm hoping you can help with some

good old fashioned experience and wisdom!

Here is our question:

What is the minimun number of referrals in a single year you would need to

see from one physician to consider him/her a " regular " referral source?

Thanks in advance for any input on this.

Dianne Jewell, PT, DPT, PhD, CCS

Assistant Professor - VCU Dept. of PT

Richmond, VA

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