Standardize referral operations across every acquisition.
A healthcare platform or MSO can establish a common coordination layer across acquired practices without replacing a single EHR. Linear Health standardizes referral coordination, prior authorization, outreach, scheduling, and exception handling into one state model with portfolio-wide visibility, while each practice's clinical systems and clinical decisions stay local. Customers typically see a 3:1 return within 90 days, and everything is measured against your own baseline.
Pick two acquisitions. Watch them speak one language.
Choose two source workflow types and see how each maps into the shared operating grammar. The mapping standardizes ownership and status; it does not touch clinical work or force uniformity where a practice legitimately differs.
Fax intake queue
Today, locally
- Referrals arrive as faxes and PDFs a coordinator re-keys
- Completeness is checked by reading each packet
- Status lives in the fax folder and someone's memory
Spreadsheet tracker
Today, locally
- Orders are copied into a shared spreadsheet by hand
- Follow-up depends on someone re-sorting the sheet
- Done means a cell was updated, if it was
Both map to the shared grammar
- The item is captured once and owned, with a named owner
- Eligibility and requirements are verified before booking
- Outreach runs on schedule, in the patient's channel and language
- Scheduled, completed, and exception states mean the same thing at every practice
The acquisition rollout playbook.
Each practice's go-live is 4 weeks once its phase begins; how many run in parallel is an operating decision made with your team.
Assess
Inventory each practice's intake channels, referral states, tooling, and exception owners. No workflow is standardized before it is understood.
Baseline
Measure current volumes, completion states, and staff time, so later claims about improvement are claims about your data.
Standardize
Map local states into the shared grammar. Legitimate local differences survive as configured exceptions with owners, not as silent forks.
Deploy
Practices go live in waves, 4 weeks each, on their existing EHRs. A newly acquired practice joins the same way, which is the point of the model.
Govern
The portfolio view runs on shared definitions, exception ownership is explicit, and month-to-month pricing keeps the arrangement reversible.
One measurement canvas, six shared definitions.
Because every practice runs the same state model, these measures mean the same thing at every site. Your numbers come from your baseline; what Linear standardizes is what the words mean.
- Queue age
- How long coordination items wait in each state, per practice and portfolio-wide.
- Completion state
- Where every referral and access item stands, with one shared definition of complete.
- Exception ownership
- How many items need a person, why, and who currently owns each one.
- Contact attempts
- Outreach performed per patient and channel, before and after automation.
- Scheduling status
- Booked, reminded, completed, and recovered no-shows, consistently counted.
- Coordinator capacity
- Staff time on routine work versus exceptions. Automation absorbs up to 90% of the routine; what a portfolio does with the recovered capacity is an operating decision.
Illustrative operating view, definitions only.
Multi-site standardization, measured.
Aunt Martha's is a 100-provider, 35-site organization and a published Linear Health customer. Its sites feed one coordination layer with shared status definitions, so a completion at one site means what it means at every other, and a central team of 2 runs the whole board.
Scope, baseline, and method: the Aunt Martha's case study. The published case studies add a specialty practice that consolidated five tools into one. A PE-portfolio case study is not yet published; the evidence above is multi-site operational. For your own numbers, the ROI calculator uses your volumes and staffing with the measured up-to-90% automation factor, shows its assumptions, and labels its output an illustrative estimate. Pricing is $1,000-$8,000/mo, usage-based, month-to-month.
What operating teams read before the assessment call.
Frequently asked questions
Direct answers for operating partners, integration leads, and MSO executives.
Can an MSO standardize referral workflows without replacing every EHR?
Yes. Linear Health runs as an operational layer on top of each practice's existing systems. athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, Greenway Health, Veradigm, and Epic are established integrations, connected through standard health-data interfaces. Local clinical records stay in place; what gets standardized is the coordination workflow and its status definitions.
How are newly acquired practices onboarded?
Each practice maps its existing intake channels, referral states, and escalation owners into the shared operating model, then goes live in 4 weeks. The practice keeps its EHR and its clinical workflows; its coordination work joins the common queue with the same status language as every other site in the portfolio.
Which portfolio KPIs can be normalized across acquisitions?
The operational states Linear tracks natively: queue age, completion state, exception count and ownership, patient-contact attempts, scheduling status, and coordinator workload. Because every practice runs the same state model, these numbers mean the same thing at every site, which is what makes portfolio comparison honest.
How is ROI calculated, and what results can we expect?
Our customers typically see a 3:1 return within 90 days, measured against their own baseline. Outcomes depend on your actual starting point: volumes, staffing, and payer mix differ across portfolios, which is why the rollout playbook baselines each practice before standardizing it. The ROI calculator uses your own inputs with a measured up-to-90% automation factor and shows its assumptions; treat its output as an illustrative estimate.
What stays locally controlled at each practice?
Clinical decisions, the clinical record, local provider and patient preferences, and any workflow exceptions the practice's own protocols require. The shared layer standardizes ownership and status of coordination work; it does not force clinical or operational uniformity where a practice legitimately differs.
Does this mean cutting coordination staff across the portfolio?
The measured effect is capacity: automation absorbs up to 90% of coordination work, and published customers chose to redeploy people to patient-facing roles rather than simply cut. What a portfolio does with recovered capacity is an operating decision; Linear's job is making the capacity real and measurable.
What does it cost across a portfolio?
Pricing is $1,000-$8,000 per month per organization, usage-based and month-to-month, with no percentage-of-savings arrangement and no long-term lock-in. That structure keeps portfolio-level rollout decisions reversible.
Pick two practices. Watch them speak one language.
Bring two acquisitions with different systems to a working demo and see their coordination work land in one queue with shared states. Month-to-month pricing keeps the decision reversible.