The most efficient method to increase patient flow and income in private medical practice is through handling physician referrals. Has anyone told you how to do that? I thought it would be a kind gesture for me to offer my version of how to make the strategy perform miracles for your practice.

So, what’s so hot about referrals? You get them occasionally without doing anything to attract them. What you may not know is that all practice statistics confirm that over 60% of new patients showing up at your door are a result of referrals by other physicians. New patients are the basis of your practice’s income. The more new patients you acquire, the more income you receive.

Very few referral patients are derived from other sources, such as your own patients, new physicians in your area, paramedical businesses, and the nurses in the hospitals where you practice.

Having a continuous feed of newly referred patients from local physicians grows your medical practice quicker and more reliably. It is a group of physicians that need a good reason to continue to refer patients to you rather than the doctor up the street.

Your time and efforts to perform referral income-producing tactics require no training of your staff and can be done by a loyal and responsible staff member. In essence, you are marketing your medical practice business while paying your office staff. It’s a very cheap marketing strategy that pays off.

You must sit down and make a list of what your staff must do—all personal notes sent to all referral physicians, gifts to send them later on holidays when the referral physician isn’t expecting it (including a personally written note thanking them) and follow what’s listed below.

Ways to make passive income in your medical practice that most physicians don’t take time to do or have done. And it’s almost free.

Treat every referred medical patient with the utmost degree of pleasantry of greetings, the gentleness of examination, and your explanation to the patient of what the problem is and how it should be treated in your opinion. The number one cause for patients leaving your practice is “how they are treated while in your office.”

If this was a consult visit only, think about what that patient will say about your care to their own physician on their next visit. If the referral was to take care of the patient’s problem completely, you would consider referring their care to yourself as a new patient you can keep. No long waits to be seen, repeated communications with the patients if the physician is delayed, and explain the cause of the delay.

Schedule the patient to be seen within 24-48 hours unless it’s an emergency situation—same day.

Always try to call the referral medical doctor promptly after the visit and let their office know about medical treatment, the discussion you had with the patient about his/her problem, and follow-up issues you advise if the patient is returning to their own physician.

Always send a written summary of the visit, treatment, and evaluation within a couple of weeks, or sooner. This covers you if you never were able to contact the referring physician after the exam, and if their own staff forgets to tell their doctor what you told them.

Always send a handwritten note back to the referral physician for referring the patient to you, thanking the office and physician. You do that because half the time, the office staff handles the referral themselves—physicians are too busy.

Handwritten notes show that you took the time to write them, so it proves to be more than an automatic gesture that happens entirely too often (probably more than 90% of the time). When you do what no other doctors are doing, you get new patients.

When you are told to keep the referred patient, the referral doctor will want to know what you did for their problem. This way, the referring physician learns new medical information they might not otherwise know. Doctors sharing medical information is called marketing.

If it involved a surgical procedure for the patient’s treatment, the referral MD would want to know the procedure and outcome. It is good marketing to send the referral physician a copy of the operative report. Even for long-term patient treatment problems, a message to the referral physician later is what other physicians rarely do. The next time that physician is referring a patient, who do you think is the #1 doctor that comes to mind? Most physicians have referral buddies—like two or three favorite ones—they always use. I guarantee that if you do all of these suggestions, which most physicians rarely do, you will replace at least two of those referral physicians’ buddies rapidly.

Referrals from sources other than physicians should be treated in the same manner. For humans, recognition is a powerful emotion. For that reason, the smart move is to pick out holidays, birthdays, or some special events where you can send pleasant gifts, cards, or food items, like Harry and David, arriving at the office of the referring physician without notice, for both the staff and the doctor. This will move you up the referral pole by 100 more notches.

A physician that had an interest in photography would send me a new photo of some unique feature in nature every Christmas. Fifty years later, I still have them. One of the worst office staff problems I had in private practice was that my front desk staff, despite my dictation to do it, refused to inform me that the new patient that I had just treated was a referred patient.

I insisted that my staff, whoever was at the front, must ask every new patient if they were referred to my office. It is very important that you, the physician, know that the new patient was referred, record the name of the person or doctor who referred them, and record also why they chose my office for care.

Curtis G. Graham is a physician.