Streamline Your Patient Intake Process

A significant number of people in America are walking around with undiagnosed sleep disorders. Recent studies indicate 14.5 percent of adults in the U.S. have difficulty falling asleep, and 17.8 percent had difficulty staying asleep.¹

While these alarming statistics highlight the urgent need for sleep disorder testing and treatment nationwide, unfortunately, many individuals won’t get that testing—and therefore, they won’t get the treatment they need either. They’ll continue to suffer from excessive daytime sleepiness, sleep-disordered breathing, and increased risk of comorbid conditions such as type II diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.

Why? Several barriers prevent patients from accessing sleep testing, including insurance hurdles, high out-of-pocket costs, and a lack of proximity to care, to name just a few. But one of the most common breakdowns happens after a patient sees their primary care provider (PCP): they get a referral for a sleep test, but they struggle to follow through.

A 2018 study found that only 34.8% of primary care referrals resulted in a documented specialist appointment.² When it comes to sleep testing, that means a lot of patients are falling through the cracks between their PCP’s office and the sleep lab. Fortunately, that’s an area where we as sleep professionals can make a difference.

The patient’s diagnostic experience begins long before they walk into the sleep lab—it starts the moment their referral is received. How your organization handles that initial touchpoint can make the difference between a completed study and a missed opportunity.

In this article, we’ll explore practical strategies and tools to streamline the patient intake process, reduce drop-off, and help more patients move efficiently from referral to diagnosis and treatment.

1. Strengthen relationships with referring physicians.

While insurance plans sometimes limit options, patients are becoming more proactive in choosing where they go for sleep testing. That makes establishing strong relationships with referring physicians and engaging in targeted outreach more crucial than ever.

Regular communication with partner physicians, collaborative training sessions, and co-branded materials help to foster trust and ensure your sleep lab is top of mind when it comes time to make a referral.

Providing consistent support to referring physicians and their staff can help keep referrals running smoothly with minimal interruptions. If a patient does not complete their test within the year, the referral process will need to start all over again. Referral expiration dates can lead to additional time spent by the intake team, physicians, and patients, creating more inefficiencies and delays in the scheduling process.

Maintain ongoing communication with the ordering physician, and keep them informed if their patients are non-responsive or slow to respond. Proactive outreach to these offices is essential, as they can help track the patient down. By keeping them informed about any delays on the patient’s side, you help protect your reputation for providing excellent customer service and care.

Some practices may need regular updates on the referred patient’s progress through the care pathway. Others may appreciate opportunities like lunch-and-learns to share updates, address bottlenecks, provide education, and connect in person. Having touchpoints like this in place not only strengthens the referral partnership, it helps improve patient outcomes and reduce unnecessary duplication of services.

2. Reinforce outreach with educational materials.

Many health care networks utilize industry- or manufacturer-created content to help physicians and patients understand the sleep study process. This gives you the perfect opportunity to share well-crafted, high-quality educational materials that physician offices and medical facilities can use to meet that need—and place front and center for patients in their waiting areas and exam rooms.

Education about the sleep study process can take many forms and varies based on geographic region, cultural norms, education levels, and access to care. The educational material for your sleep center should be targeted to your intended audience. What works for a patient population in Philadelphia, Pa., for instance, may not be applicable to patients in Greenville, S.C.

Creating digital and physical materials in multiple formats, including text, audio, and video, helps to accommodate various types of learners. For instance, you might have paper brochures, screening tools, and/or questionnaires that include a QR code that leads to online resources like instructional videos or podcasts about home sleep apnea testing (HSAT), how to prepare for a night in the sleep center, or FAQs about sleep disorders.

Ideally, these should be customized to reflect the look and feel of your institution or program. We have created several of our own in-house instructional videos with input and feedback from our technical and intake staff and referred patients, and we have seen improved conversion rates as a result.

This original content helps to educate both physicians and patients about the sleep study process, improves patient buy-in and trust, and ultimately, increases referrals and study completion.

3. Leverage digital tools to improve communication.

Clear and consistent communication throughout the intake process is key. Keeping patients and referring physicians informed at every step ensures that referrals translate into completed studies and improved patient outcomes.

Thankfully, advances in technology have provided a variety of tools that can help. These are two we’ve seen made a huge impact:

Middleware systems

Middleware systems serve as a bridge between different healthcare software platforms and applications so they can “communicate” with each other and share data. Several sleep-specific electronic medical record (EMR) middleware systems, such as LabRetriever, allow tracking of the referral process from beginning to end.

After the referral is entered into the system, the patient can be contacted, insurance authorization can be initiated, and the patient can be scheduled—all in one platform. The referring practice or hospital administration team can be given individual HIPAA-compliant access to a portal where they can track the entire process as well.

Secure automated messaging platforms

Most patients are more willing to answer a text message than a live call. Survey findings show that 80 percent of health care consumers prefer digital communication methods such as SMS messaging, online forms, and other digital channels.³

Right from the start, notifying patients when their sleep study order has been received can provide reassurance and set expectations. Text messaging provides a quick and convenient way to send pre-visit instructions, deliver appointment reminders, offer earlier appointments, and prompt follow-up communication.

Secure messaging platforms allow patients to ask questions and receive timely responses, improving engagement and willingness to schedule. AI has advanced in this area as well. These text messages can also be stored within the communication features of EMR systems. Companies such as Synthpop offer services to migrate the referral and associated documents between EMR and middleware platforms.

4. Reduce delays with smarter scheduling.

The importance of a well-organized scheduling process cannot be overstated—and that, of course, begins with ample appointment availability. Offering flexible scheduling options, including evening and weekend hours, helps accommodate patients with demanding work schedules and busy lives.

Digital tools and artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionized the way scheduling works as well.

AI-powered solutions have enabled labs to automate administrative tasks, such as data entry and scheduling, while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Integrating HL7-compatible EMR systems with automated order entry reduces errors and saves time. When considering AI partners, you must ensure these tools align with privacy regulations and integrate seamlessly with your organization’s existing workflows.

Giving patients the ability to book appointments themselves empowers them to take control of their care, which ultimately increases study completion rates. Online self-scheduling platforms that incorporate AI-driven tools can optimize appointment availability by offering patients the most convenient time slots while minimizing gaps in the schedule. Then automated reminders via text or email reduce last-minute cancellations and rescheduling.

5. Deliver results promptly and coordinate follow-up care.

Once the sleep study is completed, you’ve helped the patient clear a major hurdle in the process. But what happens next is just as critical: timely scoring, interpretation, and delivery of results are essential to coordinate proper follow-up care and get the patient treatment if needed.

There are a variety of sleep-specific hardware and software tools available to support this step. We tend to focus on the options that have active integrations or interoperative connections with our sleep middleware systems. These integrations allow study results to flow seamlessly from the diagnostic device to the middleware partner and back into the physician’s EMR platform for review.

Automated result notifications and physician portals enable referring providers to access patient data in real time, expediting treatment decisions. AI-driven tools can help to flag high-priority cases to ensure those patients get the care they urgently need in a timely manner. Follow-up communication, whether through secure messaging, phone calls, or an online patient portal, is critical to discussing results and guiding next steps.

Beyond diagnosis, automated follow-up reminders keep patients engaged in their care plan and make it easier to support compliance with PAP therapy or other prescribed treatments.

Adoption of these tools is increasing in many referring physician practices and health care systems, which makes timely communication, secure data sharing, and coordinated care easier than ever. 

Final Thoughts

It’s estimated that the associated incremental costs of sleep disorders in the United States are $94.9 billion, and growing.⁴ We need to help patients get the sleep disorder testing and treatment they desperately need to reduce these costs and improve outcomes.

In order to do that, the sleep field needs to utilize every tool and process available to us. Attention spans are shrinking, and the longer it takes to convert a referral and order into a completed test, the more likely it is that the patient may never follow through. New technologies can help us keep up with the frenetic pace.

By focusing on the strategies we outlined above, sleep professionals can optimize each stage of the referral process. Process improvement always takes time and effort, but the end result—converting patient referrals to completed studies and more importantly, supporting adherence to care and improving patient outcomes—is definitely worth it.

By Kayla Sidorski, MBA, RPSGT, and Steve Glinka, MPH, RPSGT

Source: SleepWorld Magazine

References

1. Adjaye-Gbewonyo D, Black LI, Ng AE. Sleep difficulties in adults: United States, 2020. NCHS Data Brief, no 436. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2022. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc:117490.
2. Patel MP, Schettini P, O’Leary CP, Bosworth HB, Anderson JB, Shah KP. Closing the referral loop: an analysis of primary care referrals to specialists in a large health system. J Gen Intern Med. 2018;33(5):715-21. doi:10.1007/s11606-018-4392-z.
3. Nash J. Healthcare consumers weigh in: personalized experiences are a must. Redpoint Global Blog. December 7, 2021. Accessed March 21, 2025. https://www.redpointglobal.com/blog/healthcare-consumers-weigh-in-personalized-experiences-are-a-must/.
4. Huyett P, Bhattacharyya N. Incremental health care utilization and expenditures for sleep disorders in the United States. J Clin Sleep Med. 2021;17(10):1981-1986. doi:10.5664/jcsm.9392