A better front door to referral management: Seattle Children's returns 70+ staff hours a week across referral intake
AI-assisted classification and routing help Seattle Children’s process roughly 125,000 referrals a year across 39 specialty clinics, while reducing manual intake and dramatically cutting IT involvement.
The Challenge
Seattle Children’s receives more than 10,000 specialty referrals each month across 39 clinics. Roughly 94% of those referrals arrive by fax.
Before a referral can move forward, staff need to determine which specialty it belongs to, review the information provided, identify anything missing, and route the document into the appropriate Epic process.
The hospital’s previous on-premises fax system could receive those documents, but it could not identify the information inside them. Staff had to open and manually route each fax, while urgent document requests, retrieval questions, and routing problems frequently came back to IT.
At Seattle Children’s scale, that created a significant amount of manual processing before referral teams could begin the next step.
Classifying and routing referrals as they arrive
Seattle Children’s worked with Concord to automate more of the intake process before referrals reach Epic.
An AI-assisted classification model identifies the specialty associated with an incoming referral and routes the document to the appropriate destination. It can also extract key demographic and clinical information and add the specialty and patient name to the document title. That information gives staff what they need to confirm or create the patient record and turn the incoming document into a referral in Epic.
Urgent referrals can also be prioritized and routed directly to a clinic rather than waiting in the general intake flow.
Documents that cannot be confidently classified or require additional review are directed to staff for review.
Seattle Children’s moved from pilot to full production across all 39 specialties in eight weeks.
More than 70 staff hours returned every week
Automating referral classification and routing has returned more than 70 hours each week to Seattle Children’s staff.
Instead of spending that time opening documents and determining where they belong, staff can concentrate on specific specialties and the activities required to move referrals forward. In some workflows, the same staff member can now handle the referral from intake through scheduling, reducing handoffs between teams.
The impact is visible even within individual clinics. In Dermatology, automatic routing saves approximately six hours each week across an average volume of 216 documents.
Earlier follow-up when referrals are incomplete
Not every referral arrives with the information Seattle Children’s needs.
When a referral is incomplete, inconsistent, or does not clearly identify the appropriate specialty, staff can identify the problem and follow up with the referring provider.
Clinical Intake uses more than 25 prepared cover pages for common situations, reducing the need to type individual responses and helping staff communicate what is missing or where the patient should be redirected.
Adding the patient name to document titles also allows staff to see related referral documents together, assess whether the necessary information has arrived, and avoid multiple people contacting the same family separately.
See what AI- assisted document intake can do for your organization
Giving Utilization Review more control
Seattle Children’s is applying the same document-management capabilities beyond referral intake.
Its Utilization Review team exchanges clinical reviews and authorization documents with more than 60 payers, often within strict delivery windows. When a payer questions whether information was submitted on time, staff need to be able to find the document and prove exactly when it was sent.
They can now do that without asking IT to investigate.
For some payer disputes, Seattle Children’s estimates that the inability to prove timely delivery of required information can result in significant financial exposure and lost reimbursement opportunities.
IT involvement drops from half a day every day to twice a week
The change is just as significant for IT.
Managing the previous fax environment once consumed roughly half of Grant Egerdahl’s day. Today, he estimates that he touches the system about twice a week.
Operational teams can locate documents, investigate delivery questions, and resolve many of the issues that previously required an IT ticket.
“The fax system was pretty much half my day every day. And now it’s not. I probably touch it like twice a week these days. Concord empowers people across the organization to deal with their own documents.”
Grant Egerdahl
IT Applications Analyst, Lead, Seattle Children’s Hospital
Expand beyond fax modernization
Seattle Children’s relationship with Concord began with replacing an aging fax environment. Since then, the hospital has expanded its use of classification, routing, data extraction, and document history across referral intake, Utilization Review, and other document-intensive processes.
Across referral intake, Utilization Review, and other document-intensive processes, Seattle Children’s has expanded beyond simply receiving and sending documents. Classification, routing, data extraction, and easier access to document history are giving clinical and operational teams more control over what happens after a document arrives.
The relationship with Concord has also remained a differentiator.
“Of the 100-plus vendors that my team deals with, Concord is in the top three in terms of support responsiveness and the intelligence of the responses.”
Grant Egerdahl
IT Applications Analyst, Seattle Children’s Hospital
The bottom line
Seattle Children’s is processing referral documents at significant scale with less manual routing, more than 70 staff hours returned each week, and far less dependence on IT.
What began as a fax modernization initiative has become a way to move important patient information to the right people sooner, so care teams can spend less time searching for information and more time focusing on patients.
Company
Seattle Children’s Hospital
Industry
Healthcare
Headquarters
Washington
Website
www.seattlechildrens.org
Results at a glance
returned to staff each week across referral intake
In Dermatology alone
Using AI-assisted referral classification and routing
IT involvement in managing fax-related issue
✅ 8 weeks
From pilot to full production
A better front door to referral management
Know where each referral belongs from the start
- Identifies the appropriate specialty and routes referrals to the right workflow.
- Groups related documents so staff can see what has arrived and what may still be missing.
Spend less time sorting referrals
- Reduces the need to open, identify, and manually distribute incoming referrals.
- Returns more than 70 staff hours each week across referral intake.
Catch referral issues before they create delays
- Gives staff faster access to the referral information they need to assess completeness.
- Helps staff request missing information or redirect patients when needed.
Resolve more without involving IT
- Gives Clinical Intake and Utilization Review direct access to documents, delivery history.
- Reduces routine IT involvement while supporting different specialties, staffing models, and workflows.