01 · Inbound referral coordination
Referrals arrive. Patients get booked. Charts stay current.
For specialty practices on Athena. We read every inbound referral, whether it arrives by fax, web form, phone, or email, create the chart, verify eligibility, reach the patient in five minutes, and book the appointment. Your coordinators handle the complex cases. The other 80 percent never reach their queue.
athenahealth specialist. Four established EHR integrations.HIPAASOC 2 Type IIHITRUST CSF Ready
- 09:14FAX RECEIVEDPARSED
Cardiology referral, 3 pages, sender: Dr. K. Patel (PCP)
- 09:14CHART CREATED IN ATHENAIN ATHENA
M.R., DOB on file, eligibility verified (Aetna PPO)
- 09:18PATIENT REACHEDLIVE
Outreach #1 answered. SMS confirmation queued.
- 09:31APPOINTMENT BOOKEDCLOSED LOOP
Dec 9, 2026 · 2:30 PM · Dr. Chen · 30 min slot
Your fax queue is the bottleneck of your specialty practice.
Specialty practices receive 200 to 500 referrals a month. Most arrive by fax. Coordinators spend 25 to 30 minutes processing each one. 35 percent never get completed. Patients sit unscheduled for weeks. Referring providers never hear back. The leak is structural.
manual data entry, EHR matching, eligibility
the rest sit in the fax tray
per manual referral
LINEAR HEALTH ANALYSIS
Hiring two more coordinators doesn't fix this. The model doesn't work anymore.
Seven steps. One platform. Closed inside Athena.
Linear Health automates every step of inbound referral coordination, from the moment the fax hits your DID to the moment the referring provider receives confirmation. Every action writes back to Athena (or your EHR) in real time.
- 01Fax arrivesAny DID, plus web form, email, or phoneINTAKE
- 02Document extractedDemographics, insurance, referral reason, CPTPARSED
- 03Chart created or matchedNew patient or existing, with eligibility verifiedLOOP OPENING
- 04Patient outreachSMS, email, and voice AI in the patient's preferred languagePATIENT OUTREACH
- 05Scheduling rules appliedProvider availability, payer specifics, telehealth versus in-person, prior auth flagged when neededRULES APPLIED
- 06Appointment bookedInside Athena, tailored to your providers and scheduling rulesSCHEDULED
- 07Loop closedConfirmation back to the referring providerLOOP CLOSED
04 · What it actually does
The numbers a specialty COO actually wants.
MEASURED ACROSS LINEAR HEALTH CUSTOMERS, ROLLING 90 DAYSATHENA-CONNECTED SPECIALTY PRACTICES
Linear Health completely transformed how we operate. They replaced five disconnected tools we were using to manage referrals, scheduling, and patient outreach. Now our entire workflow runs through one platform.
What clinical ops teams ask before signing.
01Do you work with my EHR?
Linear runs on top of your existing EHR rather than replacing it. athenahealth, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, and Greenway Health are established integrations, connected through standard health-data interfaces, and booked appointments and status updates are written back into your chart.
02We're already on Athena. Will this break our setup?
No. Linear connects via Athena's official API and works inside your existing tenant. We don't replace anything. We don't ask your IT team to install software. First workflow live in 4 weeks, with no EHR migration.
03What about HIPAA, PHI, and our security team?
HIPAA-compliant by default. SOC 2 Type II audited. BAAs signed before kickoff. PHI never leaves the AWS-hosted boundary. Every action is auditable. Your security team gets the SOC 2 report, the HITRUST CSF mapping, and a live walkthrough of the data-flow diagram before contract signature.
04What happens to our coordinators?
They stop doing data entry and start doing the work they were hired for. Patient navigation. Complex prior auth. Care coordination. The repetitive 25-minute referral becomes a 30-second exception review. Most of our customers redeploy at least one coordinator into a clinical-adjacent role within the first quarter.
05What if the AI gets it wrong?
It routes to a human. We tune the model on your fax patterns during onboarding, and any extraction with confidence below threshold is queued to a coordinator for one-click review. The handoff is the product, not a fallback.
06How much does it cost?
We price against the team you have today, not against a SaaS comparable. Every proposal shows your return against your own numbers. We build to 3x or better. The pricing conversation lives on the demo call. If we can't beat the cost of one full-time coordinator on the same volume, we don't pitch.
07How fast can we go live?
Four weeks. Week 1: discovery and Athena access. Week 2: faxbox integration and model tuning on your real referral patterns. Week 3: coordinator shadowing and exception-routing rules. Week 4: live in production with an L1 on-call from our team for the first 30 days.
Run your numbers.
Drag the sliders. Recovered capacity recalculates live, against an 80% automation assumption. Your team stays in the loop on the other 20%.
Your operation today
Run your numbers.
Your inputs
Enter your monthly volume and minutes per referral.
Your estimate
80% automation of referral coordination. Your team stays in the loop on the other 20%.
Capacity reclaimed
1,400 hours
per month
| Monthly | Today | Reclaimed |
|---|---|---|
| Staff hours | 1,750 | 1,400 |
See a referral close itself end to end in your EHR.
Bring your hardest referral. We'll run it through outbound, inbound, and write-back live on the call. Same payer chaos, same Athena instance, same fax queue you fight with every day.