Referral Tracking

[orlando]

Is there a way in SoftDent to track how patients heard about our office?  I know where to put patient referrals, but what about if they heard about us through one of our marketing options, say a magazine article.  Is there a way to track that?  The only thing I came up with is making a dummy "patient" called Magazine Ad and marking that patient as the referral source. 

Any input would help!

THANKS

[ayman]

that's exactly how i would do it , and seen many offices doing it 

[doctom4300]

We have a "family" with the last name of Referral. First names of the patients in the family are: Saw the Sign, Friend, Coworker, Family Member, Delta Dental, Church Bulletin, etc.

[uniondental]

I would NOt do it the way described.  What we do is go to LIST--REFERRING DOCTOR ---ADD referral sources.

Then when Patients comes in Under the referral tab USE Referred in by DOCTOR.

Now each month you can run the Reports---Practice Management---Referral---Production you will see how many from each referral source and Production & Collection.

Then we go so far as to use an excel spreadsheet to track monthly incoming and what we spend for that marketing to get our ROI (return on investment)  for the entire year.

Seems like a lot but it is a wealth of information.

Let me know if I can help further. Sharon

[uniondental]

Also meant to say if they also came from a patient referral when enter that in the Patient referred In by.  So sometime we have "Newsletter" and Mary Jones. Each patient is different.

[doctom4300]

If a doctor referred a patient to us, then we select the doctor from our specialist list. If an existing patient referred a patient, we select that patient.

But if it's not an existing patient and not another dentist or doctor, then we use the fake Referral family of patients.

[mdunham]

This is exactly the way we track non-patient referrals as well.

[dental3208]

We had trouble with this way of tracking patients when they were actually referred in by other drs because we did not have their NPI or Tax IDs entered into their referring dr screens. Have you run into this problem? I think the way that you are tracking those referrals and the reports that can be produced would be immensely helpful in our marketing efforts and budget.

[doctom4300]

We do get some sort of warning when another doctor referred them to us and we don't have the NPI or tax id (or maybe it was something else? I haven't seen it in awhile).

It was just a warning of some sort, and didn't prevent us from doing anything we needed to do.

[dental3208]

Hmmm, okay. I think it popped back as en e-claims warning for us when we tried to submit a claim saying they couldn't process it because there was no NPI/Tax ID for the referring dr. I haven't seen it in awhile either, so maybe it was a bug that was fixed.