AI-Powered Referral Processing and Scheduling for Physical Therapy Practices

Physical therapy practices across multiple locations receive referrals through inconsistent channels: faxes, emails with randomly named attachments, phone calls, and portal messages. Staff manually sort, rename, and upload each document before a patient can be scheduled. At networks with dozens or hundreds of locations, this creates per-patient overhead that compounds into days of lost scheduling capacity. TriFetch automates the full intake workflow.

1. Referral Intake and Document Processing

Referrals arrive in different formats and from different channels. TriFetch processes all of them automatically, regardless of how or where they were received.

• Monitors all inbound referral channels: fax, email attachments, and shared drives.
• OCR extracts patient name, diagnosis, referring provider, and authorization requirements from each document.
• Files renamed and organized to practice document conventions automatically.
• Documents uploaded to correct EHR sections without manual handling.
• Referrals missing required information trigger an automatic fax-back to the referring provider.

2. Insurance and Authorization Verification

PT benefit verification involves visit limits, authorization requirements, and deductible status — fields that differ by payer and often require manual portal lookups. TriFetch handles this automatically.

• Eligibility check runs automatically for each accepted referral.
• PT-specific benefits verified: visit limits, authorization requirements, deductible and copay status.
• Prior authorization submitted same-day for payers requiring it.
• Cases with coverage issues or authorization holds flagged to billing staff before scheduling begins.
• Ineligible referrals filtered out before entering the scheduling queue.

3. Patient Scheduling and Intake

After eligibility clears, the AI scheduling agent contacts the patient to schedule their initial evaluation. No phone-tag, no manual outreach, no coordinator required.

• Agent reaches out by phone to schedule the initial evaluation appointment.
• Collects preferred location, availability, and transportation confirmation.
• Routes to the appropriate clinic based on patient address, therapist availability, and wait time.
• New patient intake instructions sent with appointment confirmation.
• All interactions logged directly to the EHR — no manual data entry required.

4. EHR Chart Creation and Referral Management

Patient charts are created and populated automatically from the referral document. Staff review at a checkpoint before the chart is finalized.

• Patient chart created with all required fields populated from referral intake data.
• Referral document, insurance verification, and authorization records uploaded and categorized.
• ICD-10 and CPT codes assigned from clinical indication.
• Human approval checkpoint before the chart is finalized and appointment confirmed.

5. Multi-Location Coordination

A single TriFetch deployment covers all practice locations. Location-specific rules, therapist availability, and insurance contracts are configured per site.

• Referrals routed to the optimal location based on patient address, therapist capacity, and wait time.
• Per-site scheduling rules and insurance contract logic maintained independently.
• Enterprise-level reporting across all locations in a unified view.
• Adding new locations does not require proportional increases in administrative staff.