CarePort & NaviHealth Aren’t Enough: The Missing Link in Home Health Referral Management

Referral management is critical in home health and hospice. It determines your admission rates, patient volume, and operational efficiency. Agencies often rely on platforms like CarePort, NaviHealth, Tango, and eFax, believing referral management is covered. The hard truth is that these platforms deliver referrals effectively, but they stop there. True referral management begins after the referral lands in your system. If your goal is increasing admissions, understanding what happens next is essential.

The Referral Management Blind Spot in Home Health & Hospice

Referral management directly impacts your agency’s bottom line: admissions percentages, patient census, and operational efficiency hang in the balance. Agencies commonly lean on platforms such as CarePort, NaviHealth, Tango, and eFax to handle inbound referrals. These systems serve their initial purpose well—receiving and responding—but that's where their capability ends.

Here’s the gap most agencies overlook: none of these solutions offer tools for tracking follow-ups, analyzing referral pipelines, or coordinating across teams to improve admissions. Without these capabilities, your referral process stalls, admissions plateau, and valuable opportunities slip through your fingers.

But let's get specific. To clearly understand the gap, we'll examine two of the most common referral platforms, CarePort and NaviHealth, to see exactly what they deliver and, more importantly, what they lack.

CarePort & NaviHealth: What They Do (and Don’t Do)

CarePort Referral Management (Previously Allscripts)

✅ Strengths:
✔ Hospital and agency connectivity
✔ Simple referral acceptance or decline
✔ Efficient initial case manager communication

❌ Limitations:
✘ Lacks long-term referral tracking
✘ No visibility into unplaced referral follow-ups
✘ Missing intake and marketing collaboration tools

[Learn more about CarePort Referral Management →Click here.]

NaviHealth (now Curaspan via CarePort)

✅ Strengths:
✔ Efficient hospital discharge planning
✔ Effective across SNFs, LTACHs, and home health agencies

❌ Limitations:
✘ No internal referral tracking after receipt
✘ No real-time collaboration between teams
✘ No insights into referral conversion issues

[Learn more about NaviHealth (Curaspan) → Click here.]

Other Common Systems

Many agencies rely on simpler referral delivery tools, notably Tango and eFax. These platforms are lean, straightforward, and designed purely for referral transmission.

Tango:
✔ Simple referral acceptance or decline
✔ Streamlined, basic agency-hospital communication
✘ No referral tracking or analytics

[Learn more about Tango → click here.]

eFax:
✔ Digital transmission of referral documents
✔ Quick, binary referral responses (accept or decline)
✘ Lacks internal tracking, analytics, and follow-up functionality

[Learn more about eFax → click here.]

The Hidden Gap: Effective Referral Management

True referral management picks up exactly where referral delivery platforms leave off, after the referral hits your inbox.

Common Referral Management Approaches & Their Limitations

Many home health and hospice agencies attempt to fill the referral management gap with available tools, each bringing distinct headaches.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)

Electronic medical records seem practical at first glance but reduce referrals to basic statuses like "pending," "admit," or "non-admit." They rarely offer advanced CRM capabilities for thorough tracking or meaningful team collaboration. Even stronger systems like Kinnser EMR, known for effective referral tracking, impose hefty add-on fees and struggle with nonclinical task management.

Another familiar EMR, Netsmart, promotes referral management features but frequently disappoints with weak contact management and excessively high pricing, creating barriers for smaller and midsize agencies.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets remain surprisingly common even among Fortune 500 agencies. Excel and Google Sheets can store referrals but lock users into repetitive manual entry, inefficient updating, and cumbersome reporting. Agencies using sophisticated tools like Smartsheets have achieved notable process improvements; however, these methods typically rely on exceptional internal talent and become challenging to scale.

To further explore spreadsheet limitations, check out “The Spreadsheet Trap: Why Home Health Agencies Outgrow Manual Referral Tracking.”

General CRM Platforms: Powerful, but Not Built for Home Health

Platforms like Salesforce.com offer immense potential but require expensive third party setups, intensive management, and ongoing technical oversight. Similarly, Monday.com provides straightforward CRM integration and appealing simplicity. However, it demands substantial customization and lacks reporting capabilities tailored specifically for home health and hospice agencies.

The Ideal Referral Management Solution

The ideal referral management solution directly addresses home health and hospice agencies' unique needs. It functions seamlessly as a specialized home health CRM and hospice CRM, eliminating frustrations caused by generic solutions and infused with powerful referral management tools.

Essential criteria for your referral management solution include:

• Purpose-Built for Home Health and Hospice: Features align precisely with your agency’s workflow.
• Affordable and Ready to Use: Clear pricing, minimal setup, and rapid onboarding.
• Easy Collaboration: Intake, marketing, and operations teams coordinate effortlessly.
• Comprehensive Tracking and Actionable Insights: Robust tracking capabilities reveal what drives admissions and identify obstacles.

Explicitly developed for home health and hospice, ReferraLynx provides immediate, intuitive referral management, empowers teams to collaborate efficiently, and drives measurable increases in admissions.

Close the Referral Management Gap—Starting Today

Every referral your agency receives represents an opportunity to boost admissions and strengthen patient relationships. But without effective referral management, these opportunities fade quickly. If your current process relies only on delivery platforms, EMRs, or spreadsheets, you're leaving critical admissions on the table.

Don’t settle for partial solutions. Optimize your admissions pipeline now—schedule your ReferraLynx demo and claim your 30-day free trial.