The referring-provider portal

The referring-provider portal

The rest of this part is about referrals you send. This page is the other direction: referrals that come to you. When a community physician wants to send you a patient, the old path is a fax that lands in a pile and a loop that quietly dies — the referrer never hears whether the patient was seen. The referring-provider portal replaces that fax with a self-serve, clinic-branded web portal. Outside providers find themselves in the national registry, verify once by text, and submit a referral with almost no typing. Your front desk triages each submission straight into a chart, and from then on Hero automatically emails the referrer a private “you have an update” note each time the patient moves forward — accepted, scheduled, seen — closing the loop without a single phone call.

The whole feature is five surfaces that fit together:

• The portal — where outside providers enroll, sign in, and submit referrals. It lives at one address per clinic, https://refer.heroemr.com/?org=<your-org-id> — ready to copy from Admin → Referral Portal — which you share on your website or a referral pad.
• Inbound Referrals in the Inbox — where your staff triage each submission: link it to the right chart (or create one) and accept or decline.
• Admin → Referral Portal — where you turn it on, choose how updates go out, and verify or block individual referrers.
• The Referral Communications card on the patient’s chart — where the care team watches the loop and sends personal notes back to the referrer.
• The secure update emails and status page — the PHI-free notifications that keep the referrer in the loop.

Enrolling: NPI, a text code, and this device

Enrollment is built to take about two minutes and to need nothing a clinician doesn’t already have — no username, no password, no account approval email. A first-time referrer taps Enroll with your NPI and moves through four short steps: Find yourself → Confirm → Contact → Verify.

1. Find yourself in the registry. The referrer either enters their 10-digit NPI directly (I know my NPI) or searches the public NPPES registry by name (Search by name — last name required, first name and state optional). Hero returns live registry matches as This is me cards showing each provider’s taxonomy and city, so they can pick themselves out of a list of namesakes.
2. Confirm the prefilled details. Choosing a card prefills name, credential, specialty, and NPI from the registry. Everything is editable before continuing. If a provider genuinely isn’t in NPPES, Enter your details manually lets them type it in.
3. Add contact details. The referrer supplies the mobile number they want sign-in codes and update notifications sent to, plus an email for the secure-link notifications.
4. Verify by text. Hero texts a one-time code to that mobile number; entering it proves the number and finishes enrollment. From then on there is no password — signing in later means entering the mobile number and the texted code.

Because sign-in is a texted code rather than a password, a returning referrer would normally re-enter a code every visit. To avoid that, the portal can remember this device: once verified, the referrer’s browser holds a trusted-device credential, and future visits resume straight to their referrals with no code at all. The credential is scoped to that one browser and that one clinic and silently rotates on every use, so a stale copy can’t be replayed.

Submitting a referral

The whole point is to make sending you a patient faster than a fax, so the form asks for the bare minimum and marks nearly everything optional. A referral moves through four steps — Patient → Clinical → Insurance → Review — but only the patient’s name is actually required.

1. Patient. First and last name are the only required fields. Date of birth, phone, and email are all optional — helpful for matching to an existing chart, but never a blocker. “Only the patient’s name is required” is printed right on the step.
2. Clinical. The reason for referral and any free-text notes, plus an urgency flag when the patient needs to be seen quickly (urgent referrals are badged URGENT in your queue).
3. Insurance. Optional payer and member-ID details, if the referrer has them handy. Skippable.
4. Review & submit. A last look, then submit. The referral appears immediately in the referrer’s own list as Submitted and drops into your Inbound Referrals queue for triage.

Triaging inbound referrals

Every submission lands in one place: Inbox → Inbound Referrals. This is where a referral becomes a patient. The queue lists each incoming referral with the referrer’s identity and a verification badge, the patient details that were provided, and the clinical reason. Selecting one opens a triage pane with two decisions to make: which chart and accept or decline.

1. Match the patient to a chart. Hero suggests likely existing patients from the name and any date of birth, phone, or email the referrer supplied. Link the referral to the right existing chart, or Create patient to open a fresh chart from the referral’s details. Linking is what wires the rest of the loop — the milestone updates and the Referral Communications card all hang off the linked chart.
2. Check who sent it. The referrer’s name, NPI, and a verified / unverified badge are shown right on the referral, so staff can see at a glance whether this is a known, verified referrer before acting (verification is managed in Admin — see 13.11).
3. Accept or decline. Accept moves the referral into your workflow and — if updates are on — sends the referrer their first “accepted” notification. Decline closes it out. From here the patient is booked and seen through your normal scheduling and encounter flow.

Turning it on and setting the rules

Open the settings from the toolbar Admin menu → Referral Portal. The dialog has two halves — the org-wide switches at the top and the referrer directory below.

Enable & update policy

The Referring provider portal switch turns the portal on for your organization. Below it sits the single most important choice, the update mode (Automatic or Manual), the per-milestone toggles that decide which moments generate an update, and a gate that ties updates to verification.

The referrer directory: verify & block

The lower half lists every provider who has enrolled against your clinic, with a control to verify or block each one:

• Verify marks a referrer as a known, trusted correspondent. If your organization is set to require verified referrers, verification is what gates their automatic updates — an unverified referrer’s milestone emails are held back until someone verifies them.
• Block stops a referrer cold: every milestone email is suppressed for a blocked referrer, and they no longer receive status updates. Use it for spam or a provider who should no longer be corresponding with your practice.

The Referral Communications card

Once a referral is linked to a chart, that chart grows a Referral Communications section in the patient-info panel — it renders down the vertical panel, below Preferred Pharmacies; expand it if it’s collapsed. This is the care team’s window on the loop for that patient, and the place to send a personal note back to the referrer.

• The milestone timeline — submitted, accepted, scheduled, seen — with the date each step happened, mirroring what the referrer sees on their status page.
• Update release state. Each milestone shows whether its update has been released to the referrer or is still pending. In manual update mode (13.11) a pending update sits here with a Release control until a staff member sends it; in automatic mode it releases itself.
• A note composer. Staff can type a short personal note — “Intake went well, follow-up booked in two weeks” — and send it to the referrer. The note appears on the referrer’s secure status page under “From the care team.”
• A per-referral auto-update toggle. Even with the org in automatic mode, an individual referral can have its automatic updates turned off here — useful for a sensitive case where you’d rather release each update by hand.

The PHI-free update emails & status page

This is the half of the feature the referrer experiences after they’ve submitted: the automatic loop-closing updates. As the patient progresses — accepted at triage, scheduled on the calendar, and seen once the encounter is signed — Hero emails the referrer a short “you have an update” message. Crucially, the email itself carries no protected health information: no diagnosis, no note, not even the clinical reason — just a nudge and a secure link.

Following the link opens the referrer’s secure status page, which is gated before it shows anything:

1. Verify to view. The link is verified either by a fresh one-time code texted to the referrer, or automatically if they’re on a device they previously chose to trust (the same trusted-device credential from sign-in). Only then does the page render.
2. Read the loop. The page shows the patient, the current status, the full Submitted → Accepted → Scheduled → Seen timeline with dates, and any personal notes the care team released — each note stamped “from the care team” with its date.
3. Links expire. Each secure link is good for about 7 days. After that the referrer simply opens the portal and signs in to see the same status live — nothing is lost, the one-time link just ages out.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

Still stuck? The portal footer reads “Powered by Hero EMR” on every screen — email support@heroemr.com and we’ll help you trace where an update stopped.