How an ENT Practice Converted Faxed Referrals Into Scheduled Patients While Reducing Staff Workload

The Fax Machine Is Still King, But It’s Burying Your Referrals

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about specialty practices: the fax machine isn’t going anywhere. Across all surgical specialty groups, faxes remain a primary new patient channel. Primary care physicians, urgent care clinics, and others still rely on that familiar hum of the fax machine to send patients your way.

The problem isn’t the fax itself. It’s what happens after it arrives.

In most practices, those referrals land in your EHR, your inbox, or even worse, in a pile. Someone has to sort through dozens or more faxes per day, separating true referrals from lab results, insurance documents, and junk. Then comes the real bottleneck: pulling patient information, entering it into the EHR, and attempting outbound calls that more often than not go straight to voicemail.

Meanwhile, the patient who was referred to you three days ago? They’re still waiting to hear from someone. Or worse, they’ve already scheduled with your competitor down the street. The patient often just hears they need to see a specialist, and doesn’t remember they were referred directly to your practice.

You get lost revenue, frustrated referring physicians who wonder why their patients aren’t being seen, and a front desk team that’s perpetually underwater.

But what if those referrals could be reached instantly without your schedulers lifting a finger?

A Large ENT Group With a Big Referral Problem

One of our partners is a large, multi-location ENT and allergy group. Like most specialty practices of their size, they receive tons of faxes: processing upwards of 60 inbound faxes per day across their locations.

Their referral workflow looked like what you’d expect. Staff would manually review each fax, determine whether it was a true referral or something else, extract the patient’s contact information, and then attempt to reach out by phone. On a good day, they’d get through to some patients. On most days, they’d leave voicemails and mark a task to call back the next day.

Over a two-month period, this practice processed ~3,800 faxes. That’s nearly 1,900 faxes per month landing in the queue, each one representing a potential new patient, and each one requiring manual effort just to determine the document type and if outreach is needed.

The staff wasn’t failing. They were just outpaced by volume. There’s only so many hours in the day, and when you’re juggling phone calls, paperwork, and in-office patients, outbound referral follow-up inevitably slips down the priority list.

The gap was clear: hundreds of referred patients weren’t being contacted quickly enough. Some weren’t being contacted at all. And every delay meant a higher chance that patient would find care elsewhere. Ultimately, they wanted to fix their problem without ripping out their existing systems or making a drastic workflow change.

A Simple Workflow That Changes Everything

The workflow takes about two minutes to learn and requires no technical expertise:

Step 1: While handling referrals, download the PDF for each referred patient.

Step 2: Once or twice a day, log into blue.nemedic.com, drag those PDFs into the outreach agent, and click “Run batch.”

Step 3: Blue handles the rest.

That’s it. No complicated integrations. No lengthy onboarding. No new software to master.

Behind the scenes, Blue does the heavy lifting automatically. It classifies each fax, distinguishing true referrals from lab results, insurance forms, and other documents. It extracts key fields: patient name, date of birth, phone number, referral details and outputs that info into an EHR-friendly format. It triggers immediate SMS outreach so referred patients can self-schedule. And it avoids duplicate outreach automatically, so you’re never spamming the same patient twice.

Blue is also flexible in how it reaches patients. Depending on your practice’s preferences, patient outreach can direct them to call a specific location based on their health complaint, send them to a provider landing page, offer a self-schedule link, or point them to your website’s appointment form.

Soon, automatic fax forwarding will allow inbound faxes to route directly into Blue the moment they arrive. Eliminating the manual upload step entirely. Zero-touch referral outreach from the moment a fax hits your line.

1600 Referrals Reached Instantly—Here Are the Numbers

Let’s talk about the results. Over a two-month period, here’s what happened when this practice started running their faxed referrals through Blue:

Out of 3,800 faxes uploaded, Blue identified 1,630 as true patient referrals and immediately sent each of those patients a text message with scheduling options. That’s 43% of all inbound faxes converted into instant patient outreach, without a single phone call from staff.

Those 1,630 patients received a text within moments of their referral being processed. No waiting for someone to get around to calling. No voicemail tag. Just an immediate touchpoint letting them know the practice received their referral and inviting them to schedule.

The response was strong. Patients clicked the scheduling links 1,822 times. The click-through rate is over 100% meaning many patients clicked more than once or returned to the link to complete scheduling. That’s active engagement from people who want to book an appointment.

The practice impact is simple: Over 43% of faxes now get invited into scheduling immediately, without schedulers having to call.

Think about what that means for your front desk. Instead of spending hours dialing through a list of referrals and leaving voicemails, your staff can focus on the patients already in front of them. The outreach happens automatically, in the background, the moment you process the fax.

Stop Losing Referrals to the Fax Pile

When a primary care physician sends you a referral, they’re trusting you with their patient. That referral represents a relationship between the referring doctor and the patient, and between your practice and the referring doctor. Every referral that goes cold chips away at that trust.

Patients today expect fast, modern communication. They’re used to booking dinner reservations, scheduling haircuts, and ordering groceries from their phones. They notice when they get referred to a specialist and don’t hear anything. And increasingly, they quickly move on.

Your staff knows this. They’re not ignoring referrals because they don’t care. They’re ignoring them because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Between answering phones, checking in patients, handling insurance questions, and putting out fires, outbound referral calls fall down the list. It’s not a personnel problem. It’s a bandwidth problem.

Automating that first touchpoint changes the equation. Patients get reached immediately. Staff gets to focus on high-value tasks instead of dialing through a list and leaving voicemails. And you get structured data and reporting that helps you understand your referral pipeline.

The fax machine isn’t going anywhere. But the pile of unanswered referrals sitting next to it? That can disappear.

See What Blue Can Do for Your Referrals

If your practice is processing dozens of faxed referrals every week and your team is struggling to keep up with outbound calls, Blue can help.

The workflow is simple. The results are measurable. And getting started is free.

You pay for what gets processed. That means your investment scales with your volume, and you’re never paying for something that isn’t working.

Most practices are up and running within a week. No complex integrations. No lengthy IT projects. Just a straightforward tool that turns your fax pile into scheduled patients.

Ready to see how it works? Schedule a demo and we’ll walk you through the workflow, show you real data from practices like yours, and answer any questions about how Blue fits into your current process.

Your referrals are already coming in. Let’s make sure they turn into patients.