How Total Sleep Management Unlocked 20% WoW Referral Growth With Tennr Without Adding Headcount
Providing Outstanding Sleep-Related Diagnostic and Treatment Services
The Challenge
A Mountain of Referral Faxes (and many duplicates)
Total Sleep Management’s team of 5 patient intake specialists was struggling to efficiently process an ever-growing volume of sleep study referrals—around 3000 per month— from referring physicians. The high volume of referrals (and lack of understanding from physicians in terms of eligibility and coverage) led to operational waste and patients slipping through the cracks.
“Since 2014, I’ve been staring at incoming faxes. And I’m really over it. But I’m hanging in.”
Enter Tennr…
Chip Holland, President of TSM, read an article in Forbes about how Tennr reads documents from incoming faxes passing through healthcare practices and automates essential tasks like scheduling and qualifying patient visits. “It was a perfect, perfect fit.”
Life with Tennr
“The light at the end of the tunnel is growing bright from my perspective. I am in these charts doing what I had dreamt about doing a year ago, which was engaging with these people within 24 hours."
Tennr collaborated closely with TSM to identify goals, address the root causes of their wrangling and intake challenges, and quickly get implemented.
The team identified three goals:
- Increase the speed of processing referrals
- Increase referral volume without scaling headcount
- Improve intake accuracy
The Results
20% week-over-week increase in chart creation with a fraction of the team effort
After getting up and running with Tennr, the TSM team began seeing improvements in chart creation speed immediately. Since getting started in July 2024, TSM has seen a consistent 20% week-over-week increase in chart creation in their EHR, HealthFusion.
The backlog of faxes has dwindled. “We’re getting little miracles every day,” said Chip.
What’s next?
“I call it the ‘Tennr effect.’ For every action, there’s a reaction. As we speed things up at the front of the time, it’s going to have downstream effects.”
Total Sleep Management is eager to see the downstream effects that increased patient intake efficiency has brought. Chip is optimistic that their newfound speed and accuracy will lead to improvements in key performance indicators—increased employee satisfaction and physician satisfaction—and ultimately, revenue growth. “We’re just getting started,” said Chip.
