Extract data from referral forms
Unstract reads specialist, home health and therapy referral forms that arrive by fax with clinical notes and an insurance card attached, checks the referral is complete, and sends a structured record to your EHR or practice management system.
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REF-CARD-03 · PAGE 1 OF 7
{ "patient": "Halvorsen, Margaret", "date_of_birth": "09/23/1957", "referring_provider": "Priya Nandakumar, MD", "referring_npi": "1730592846", "referred_to": "Cardiology", "payer": "Summit River Health", "member_id": "SRH402771936", "diagnosis_icd10": "R00.2", "urgency": "Urgent", "confidence": 0.93}
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Referring offices send whatever their fax machine produces
A few referrals come through a portal as typed PDFs. The rest land on the fax line as packets of mixed pages, in no fixed order.
Faxed, printed, then faxed again by a second office
Referral form, visit notes, ECG and card in one transmission
Reason for referral in pen, the urgency box changed by hand
Every referring office uses its own referral form
A home health order with the therapy visit plan on page two
Intake coordinators sort each fax page by page and key the referral into the scheduling screen, so a missing note or a wrong member ID turns into a callback to the referring office while the patient waits for a date.
Unstract splits the fax, reads the referral form and the pages behind it, checks that the clinicals and insurance are there, and sends the referral to your EHR or practice management system for your team to accept and schedule.
Read the fax, confirm the referral is complete, hand it to scheduling
LLMWhisperer reads every page of the fax, Document Studio returns the referral record and its completeness checks, and Flow runs referral processing from the fax line to the work queue. Start with any one of the three.
Read referral forms with the referring and receiving providers kept apart
A referral form names two practices, two phone numbers and often two fax numbers, and a mix-up sends the appointment letter to the wrong office. LLMWhisperer keeps the layout, so the referring provider's NPI stays in the referring block and the receiving practice's fax stays with the receiving practice. It reads the handwritten reason for referral, reports which urgency box is ticked, and handles pages that have been faxed more than once.
Pass the text to your own LLM, or use it as the first step of a referral and patient intake run.
Learn more about LLMWhispererTurn each referral form and its attachments into one referral record
Define the referral record once: patient demographics, referring provider and NPI, receiving specialty, payer and member ID, diagnosis as written, ICD-10 code where the form prints one, reason, urgency and the attachment list. Referral form data extraction returns the same JSON for a clinic's specialist referral, a hospital discharge referral and a home health or therapy order. Your checks travel with the record: the NPI has ten digits, the member ID matches the insurance card in the fax, and every page the form says is attached is in the packet.
Deploy it as an API behind your referral portal, or as an ETL pipeline over the folder your fax server writes to.
Learn more about Document StudioRun referral intake from the fax line to the scheduling queue
Describe your referral forms, and the notes, ECGs and insurance cards faxed with them, in plain language, and Flow's agents build the referral workflow from that description. You approve it, and every referral then follows the same path: picked up from the fax line, portal or inbox, split into its pages, read, matched to an existing patient or set up as new, and placed in the work queue of your EHR or practice management system, sorted by urgency.
An uncertain patient match, missing clinicals or an out-of-network plan stops for an intake coordinator, with the reason attached. Unstract reads the referral and checks that it is complete. Your team decides whether to accept it and books the appointment.
Learn more about FlowExtract a stack of faxed referrals today. Map the full run with us.
Start for free with a folder of referral faxes. A run that feeds your EHR or practice management system begins with a consultation.
Specialist referrals, home health orders and the pages faxed behind them
Documents
- Specialist referral forms
- Outpatient consultation requests
- Home health referral orders
- Physical and occupational therapy referrals
- Imaging and diagnostic referral orders
- Hospital discharge referrals
- Fax cover sheets
- Clinical and visit notes
- Insurance card copies, front and back
- Patient demographic face sheets
- Lab and ECG results sent with a referral
- Any other referral paperwork your practice receives
Fields captured
Processes these forms feed
Built for the teams who receive referrals
Referrals arrive in the work queue already split, read and sorted by urgency, so coordinators call patients instead of sorting faxes.
One way of reading referrals from every referring office, with a count of incomplete referrals by sender to take back to them.
Discharge and transfer referrals matched to the right patient record before the patient reaches registration.
Specialty and dental referrals read with the diagnosis and reason the referring provider wrote, ready for the clinician's triage.
Fewer faxes sorted by hand, fewer callbacks to referring offices
A referral fax carries the whole patient file
A referral packet sends a patient's name, date of birth, member ID, diagnosis and visit notes over a fax line in one transmission, often to a shared machine. Anyone who reads the packet learns who the patient is, how they are covered and what condition they are being sent in for.
- Encrypted in transit and at rest.
- Referral faxes are never used to train models.
- Access by role, location and referral type, with every correction logged against the referral.
- Processed faxes are deleted on the retention schedule your organization sets.
- Self-hosted deployment for health systems that keep PHI inside their own network.
What intake coordinators and practice managers ask about referrals
Unstract reads the referral form and the pages faxed with it and returns one structured record, so coordinators review referrals instead of keying them. LLMWhisperer reads the fax, Document Studio extracts the fields you define, and Flow places the referral in the work queue of your EHR or practice management system.
Document Studio deploys an API endpoint per referral type. POST a faxed referral, and the record comes back as JSON with the patient, referring provider and NPI, insurance, diagnosis, urgency and attachment list, plus any field flagged for review.
Document Studio uses LLMs to pull the fields you name from each referral form, whichever office's layout it arrives on, and checks them against the rest of the packet. Flow's agents then run the intake steps around it, from the fax line to the scheduling queue.
Yes. Patient referral form OCR with LLMWhisperer reads a handwritten reason for referral next to the printed labels, and its output shows which urgency and attachment boxes are ticked and which are empty.
Fax referral processing starts by classifying each page: referral form, clinical notes, insurance card, ID or results. The packet then comes back as one referral record, with each attachment named and any page the form lists but the fax lacks flagged.
No. Unstract reads the referral and checks that it is complete. Your intake team decides whether to accept it, and your team books the appointment.
Yes. You define a schema for each referral type, so a home health order returns the requested disciplines and visit counts, and a specialist referral returns the receiving specialty and reason.
It checks what is on the page: the NPI has ten digits and matches across the form and cover sheet, and the member ID matches the insurance card in the fax. Eligibility and network checks stay with your payer tools, and an out-of-network plan stops for a coordinator.
The referral stops with the missing items listed, so a coordinator can request them from the referring office in one call. Complete referrals keep moving to the queue.
Unstract is SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR and HIPAA compliant. Referral faxes are encrypted in transit and at rest, never used to train models, and deleted on your retention schedule. Practices and health systems that need referrals in-house can run Unstract themselves. See the Trust Center for the full controls.
A practice manager can start for free and extract a folder of referral faxes the same day. For the full referral run, we build it with your team in a consultation around your fax line and your EHR or practice management system.
Bring last week's referral faxes to the consultation
Specialist referrals, home health orders and the notes and cards faxed behind them. We run them in the session and show which referrals would have gone back for missing pages.