Patient Referral Triage Assistant

Referrals arrive by fax-to-email, portal export, and provider email — and each one has to be read, logged, and triaged before a patient can be scheduled. This assistant reads every incoming referral as it lands, extracts the patient, referring provider, reason, and requested specialty, classifies urgency, and flags anything missing or needing prior authorization. Your coordinators schedule by clinical priority instead of re-keying fax cover sheets.

Category: Healthcare

How it works

1. A referral lands — a fax-to-email, a portal export, or a provider's email — and is collected in one place.
2. The assistant reads each referral, extracting the patient, referring provider, reason, requested specialty, and insurance.
3. It classifies urgency — routine, urgent, or STAT — and flags missing information or referrals that need prior authorization.
4. Each referral is logged as one row, and a scheduling or info-request note is drafted for your review.

Key benefits

• Schedule patients by clinical urgency, not arrival order
• Stop re-keying referral faxes and cover sheets
• Catch missing info and prior-auth needs before scheduling
• Keep one clean, searchable referral log

Use cases

• Specialty clinic referral coordinators
• Hospital central intake & access teams
• Medical group scheduling teams
• Practice managers & operations leads

Frequently asked questions

How does the Patient Referral Triage Assistant work without connecting to my EHR or fax system?

You manually upload or forward referral documents (fax-to-email, portal exports, provider emails) into your Gaia workspace table. The assistant then reads each document, extracts key details, and classifies urgency — it never connects to external systems.

Does this assistant automatically schedule appointments or send messages to patients?

No, it never auto-schedules or sends anything. It drafts a scheduling note or an info-request message for your review; a human coordinator must approve before any patient contact.

Can I customize the urgency categories or the fields it extracts?

Yes, you can modify the extraction fields (e.g., add insurance or referring provider) and adjust the urgency logic (routine, urgent, STAT) directly in the assistant's prompt or table schema.

What happens if a referral has missing information or needs prior authorization?

The assistant flags missing fields and prior-auth requirements in the row, and drafts a note requesting the missing info for your review before scheduling proceeds.

Is this free to try, and do I need any coding skills?

Gaia offers a free tier to test the assistant. No coding is required — you set it up by uploading referrals and configuring the extraction rules in the no-code interface.