The Invisible Pain of Referral Delays – and Why We Built a Better Way

As a practicing pediatric gastroenterologist, I've spent years on the front lines of patient care, often in the moments when patients and families are most vulnerable. One thing that has remained painfully consistent across healthcare settings, despite all our technology and innovation, is how broken the referral process remains.

Patients are referred into specialty care every day with hope — hope for faster answers, for better outcomes, for a plan that may change their lives. Yet far too often, that hope is met with a confusing, opaque process that neither they nor their referring provider can easily navigate.

The current state of referrals is unacceptable.

Nationally, an estimated 25%–50% of referrals are never completed.¹ This means countless patients fall through the cracks, never receiving the care they were intended to get. For those who do get through, delays of weeks (or even months) are common. In pediatrics, where early intervention can dramatically change outcomes, these gaps are particularly heartbreaking.

As a clinician, you don’t just see the consequences of referral breakdowns – you feel them. You feel the mounting anxiety of the parents calling your office, wondering why they haven't heard back. You feel the frustration of your own front desk staff trying to chase down paperwork that was faxed, but never received. You feel the weight when a child’s condition worsens simply because the system didn’t move fast enough.

It’s an invisible pain that erodes trust in healthcare as a whole.

Despite investing millions into EHRs, patient portals, and practice management systems, the industry still relies heavily on faxes, spreadsheets, and manual intake processes for referrals. In fact, more than 75% of all healthcare communication across organizations still flows through fax.² Yet the antiquated and manual process continues, often taking hours per patient and taking weeks at a time, from transcribing faxes to create patient records by hand in the EHR, calling insurance companies to do eligibility checks, trading faxes and phone calls to gather medical records, it’s all too manual, too inefficient and simply unsustainable.  

That’s why, when we built Dock Health’s Referral Management Hub, we didn't just aim to automate a few tasks, we aimed to streamline the process from start to finish to protect the patient and provider experience at its most vulnerable handoff point. We’ve taken an incredibly laborious and unreliable process, even in the best hospitals and leveraged technology to create a highly reliable, automated workflow that provides efficiency, visibility and accountability. In creating an integrated and highly automated process, we enable the care team with superpowers, allowing them to do more with less at scale, serve their patients and referral network faster, and improve access and the quality of referrals in the end. 

An AI-enabled and highly reliable workflow

As with every process in healthcare, it boils down to tasks and a deep understanding of the process, the people and the systems that need to be connected. As we’ve worked with hundreds of healthcare organizations, these processes and best practices become increasingly clear. With the explosion of generative AI and the ability for agents to increasingly manage these discrete tasks along a workflow, the process becomes more efficient and more highly reliable. Referral management as a phenomenal example is an incredibly high-touch manual process, yet in the very near future will be orchestrated by Dock, with agents tackling tasks, handing off to other agents, all while humans remain in the loop to ensure exactly what was intended was completed. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be building the productivity platform for healthcare, enabled by AI.   

We didn’t build Dock to replace the human touch. We built it to protect it.

Instead of faxes piling up in inboxes, Dock leverages AI to parse incoming documents automatically. Instead of relying on sticky notes, spreadsheets and memory, Dock automatically maps extracted fields to the right workflows, patients, and team members. Instead of referral coordinators manually entering and sorting data, Dock triggers automations that ensure every referral is captured, categorized, and moved swiftly toward scheduling.

Clinicians and care teams can then spend more of their energy on meaningful conversations with patients, not chasing paperwork. Referral managers can spend more time ensuring access, not fighting with technology. Patients can feel carried through the system, not abandoned by it. And referring providers can have visibility into a previously opaque process to improve care coordination and network integrity. 

Every referral is a patient and family in need.

It’s a need that deserves urgency, attention, and respect. At Dock Health, we believe productivity in healthcare isn’t about doing more – it’s about making space for what matters most. Our Referral Management Hub ensures that no patient is left waiting longer than they should, and no care team is left overwhelmed and without the right tools to get the job done well. 

In healthcare, we can't afford for inefficiency to be the silent cause of suffering. We built Dock to make sure it isn’t.

Sources for data points used:

¹ NEJM Catalyst, 2018. “The Referral Process in Healthcare.” ² Healthcare IT News, 2022. “Fax is still king: 75% of healthcare communication is still through fax machines.”