It’s one thing to understand the types of referrals, but quite another to know which type is growing your practice. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but I want to stress it further.

Tracking your referrals is actually pretty straightforward, but often neglected. For the most part, it’s a front-line job, and needs to happen the first time a patient arrives. The easiest way to do it is to make it part of your intake form. It’s very difficult and far less accurate (and less likely to happen) later on in the patient cycle. The great thing is that it’s easy to implement – if you’ve got staff, just make it part of the new patient process. That’s it.

If you’re using any type of software to run your office, there may be a place to enter this information. If not, a spreadsheet will do just fine. Even a piece of paper will work, but it’s a lot harder to do the math at the end of the quarter or year.

You can use the 5 referral type framework to categorize your new patients, each with a sub categories:

Professional

• Break this down by profession – chiropractors, naturopaths, MD’s, acupuncturists, TCM practitioners, etc. – and then even further by the actual professional (Dr. Jones, Dr. Ahmad, J. Doe, etc.).

Patient

• List by patient, and enter into the referring patient’s file as well, so you know when you see a patient who they’ve referred recently. It’s quite helpful to jot this on the inside cover of their file so you can see it as soon as you open it, and thank them on the spot for recent referrals.

Promotional

• Again, this can be categorized by print, other media, speaking engagements, internet, etc, then broken down further by the actual magazine, paper, website, etc.

Purchase

• Patient files you’ve bought. If you’ve purchased from more than one source, list them separately

Personal

• Family, friends, etc.

In a future post, we’ll take a look at how this info can be used to help you grow faster and spend smarter.