Turn incoming referrals into scheduled next steps.
Linear Health is operational AI for healthcare that automates referral intake for specialty practices: it captures referrals from fax, portal, and direct send, verifies eligibility before booking, reaches the patient in about 5 minutes, schedules the visit in your EHR, and returns status to the referring office. Anything that needs judgment stays visible for your staff to review.
ArrivesReferral packet, fax or portal
BecomesStructured, verified data
Visit booked in your EHR
Confirmation returned to the referrer
Referrals do not stall in the exam room. They stall in the queue.
In industry-typical operations, only 50 to 65% of referrals complete, and each manually coordinated referral consumes 45 to 90 minutes of coordinator time. The loss happens at four predictable points in the intake anatomy.
Missing pages, absent insurance, no chart note. Until someone notices and chases it, the referral is invisible to your schedule.
Manual queues reach patients in 3-7 days. By then the urgency has faded and phone tag has started.
Eligibility checked after the calendar fills surfaces later as denials and reschedules. It belongs before the booking.
Offices that get no status stop referring. The returned confirmation is what keeps a specialty network warm.
Completion-rate range: Institute for Healthcare Improvement and National Patient Safety Foundation report on referral completion. Coordinator-time range: Linear Health referral process analysis.
Paper to appointment, five stages with one owner.
Every incoming referral moves through the same five stages. Each stage links to the product page that owns its mechanics.
Capture
Faxes, portal entries, and direct sends are ingested and extracted into structured data, without re-keying. The full mechanics live on the inbound referral coordination page.
Normalize
The referral becomes a work item with a completeness check: documents, demographics, insurance, and the requested service. Missing pieces are requested from the referrer automatically and stay visible until present.
Verify
Eligibility, network status, and any required authorization are confirmed before booking. Prior authorization automation handles the submissions that gate specialty visits.
Contact and schedule
Patients are reached by text, email, and voice AI in about 5 minutes, and the visit is booked directly in your EHR through the scheduling engine, with reminders that protect the slot.
Update the record and the referrer
The booked visit and its outcome are written back to your chart, and a confirmation returns to the referring office, the courtesy that keeps referral relationships sending.
When a packet needs a person.
Clean referrals never wait for a human. The ones that need judgment move to a staff-owned drawer with the reason attached, and they stay visible until someone resolves them.
Missing documents after automated requests, a patient unreachable after the outreach sequence, an insurance question that needs a decision, a scheduling conflict: each pauses the automation and lands here with a named owner.
Resolution puts the referral back on the automated path. Nothing exits the queue silently, and nothing waits on a person unless it genuinely needs one.
A specialty sleep practice, before and after intake automation.
Texas Sleep Medicine is a published Linear Health customer. It replaced five disconnected intake tools with one system, went live in 4 weeks, and took a 37% missed-call rate to near zero.
“Linear Health completely transformed how we operate. They replaced five disconnected tools we were using to manage referrals, scheduling, and patient outreach.”
Full scope and method: the Texas Sleep Medicine case study. Results reflect this practice's baseline and volume.
One observable change for every seat.
Referral coordinators
Stop re-keying faxes. The queue arrives structured, and the workday shifts to the exception drawer, the calls and decisions that actually need a person.
Schedulers
Patients arrive at the calendar already verified and already reached, so booking is a confirmation, not a chase. Reminders and reschedules run automatically.
Practice leaders
Every referral has a queryable status: received, verified, contacted, booked, seen, returned. Intake stops being a black box you learn about from complaints.
Referring offices
They send a patient and hear back: confirmation on receipt, an update at booking, and status at completion, without calling your front desk to ask.
Go deeper on each stage.
Frequently asked questions
Direct answers to the questions specialty intake teams ask in evaluations.
How does referral intake automation work for a specialty practice?
Linear Health captures each incoming referral from fax, portal, or direct send, extracts it into a structured work item, checks eligibility and any required authorization, contacts the patient, books the appointment in your EHR, and returns status to the referring office. Anything incomplete or unusual routes to your staff as a visible exception instead of sitting in a fax queue.
What happens when a referral arrives incomplete?
The referral is not dropped and not silently parked. Linear flags exactly what is missing, such as a chart note or demographics, requests it from the referring office, and holds the work item in a review lane your team can see. Staff decide how to proceed on anything that needs judgment; the automation keeps the rest of the queue moving.
How fast is the first patient contact?
About 5 minutes from referral receipt, compared with the 3-7 days a manual intake queue typically takes. Early contact matters because patients book while the visit is still top of mind.
Does Linear Health work with our EHR?
Linear runs on top of your existing EHR rather than replacing it. athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, Greenway Health, Veradigm, and Epic are established integrations, connected through standard health-data interfaces, and booked appointments and status updates are written back into your chart.
Does this replace our intake and scheduling staff?
It automates up to 90% of the coordination work: capture, data entry, eligibility checks, outreach attempts, and status updates. Your staff keep the judgment calls, working a visible exception queue instead of re-keying faxes. Most practices redeploy that time to patient-facing work.
How long does it take to go live, and what does it cost?
Go-live is 4 weeks. Pricing is $1,000-$8,000/mo, usage-based, month-to-month, with no long-term contract required. Our customers typically see a 3:1 return within 90 days, measured against their own baseline.
Bring a week of your intake queue. Watch it become a schedule.
In a working demo we run the intake workflow on your EHR and your payer mix, not a slideshow. Go-live is 4 weeks, on the EHR you already run.