Patient & Appointment Referrals

When managing patient records or generating reports, you'll come across two types of referral fields in the HearLink system:

• Referral - Patient
• Referral - Appointment

These are used in different contexts and provide important insights into where your patients are coming from.

In this article we'll cover:

• the difference between Referral - Patient and Referral - Appointment.
• when to use each one.
• how they appear in filters and reports.

Referral - Patient

This refers to the original source of the patient when they were first added to your system. It's entered during patient creation and remains part of the core profile data.

Use Referral - Patient to:

• track long term patient resources.
• understand marketing performance.
• segment patients for communication or recall campaigns.

You'll also see this used as a filter in reports such as:

• Appointments Overview.
• Outcome Report.
• Payments Overview.

Referral - Appointment

This refers to the specific referral source used when an appointment is booked, which can differ from the patient's original referral. It allows you to track referral sources per appointment.

Use Referral - Appointment to:

• track how a patient came to book a specific appointment.
• see variations in lead sources across a patient's journey.
• better attribute appointment activity to marketing or referrers.

This field appears in filters and groupings in reports where appointment level tracking is important.

Summary

Both referral types are valuable and serve different purposes:

They can be used in reports , filtering, and analysis. Providing an insight at both patient and appointment level.