A private clinic wants bloods done for its patients. The clinician looks at three lab websites, finds patient booking pages, price lists aimed at consumers and no indication of how a practice would actually set up an account.
She picks the one that has a page for referrers, because that is the only one that made it possible.
Step 1: build a page for referrers
Separate from the patient pages, findable, and written for a clinician. It should answer how to open an account, how to order, how samples reach you and how results come back.
Step 2: publish the full test menu
Test names, codes, sample type and tube required, volume, turnaround and price. Clinicians choose from this, and a menu that needs an email to obtain loses the referral.
Step 3: be precise about sample requirements
Tube type, volume, handling, whether anything needs to be frozen or protected from light and stability windows. Rejected samples are the fastest way to lose a referrer permanently.
Step 4: explain collection logistics
Whether you collect, on what schedule, what happens to urgent samples, what courier arrangements exist and what a practice must do to be added to a round.
Step 5: make requisitioning simple
A form, a portal or an integration. Whatever it is, publish it with an example, because a clinician filling in an unfamiliar form at the end of a clinic will abandon it.
Step 6: explain result delivery
Format, how quickly, whether abnormal results are flagged, whether they are telephoned and how a referrer accesses historic results. This is what determines whether a clinician uses you a second time.
Step 7: define the urgent pathway
What counts as urgent, how it is requested and how a critical result reaches a clinician out of hours. A lab without a clear answer here will not be used for anything that matters.
Step 8: handle patient-facing questions separately
Patients referred by a clinician still ask about preparation, timing and location, which is covered in test booking and preparation questions for diagnostic labs.
Step 9: never interpret a result, for anyone
Not for patients and not by improvising something to a clinician's staff. Results belong with the reporting pathologist and the referring clinician.
Step 10: publish billing arrangements
Whether the practice is invoiced, whether patients pay directly, what credit terms exist and how a split is handled. Unclear billing stops a referral relationship before it starts.
Step 10b: publish your accreditation and methods
Clinicians choosing a laboratory want to know which accreditation it holds, which methods and analysers are used for the tests they order and whether reference ranges are published. This is the detail that makes a referrer confident enough to put their own name on a result, and it is almost never on a lab website.
Step 10c: name a contact who answers
Referrers need somebody to ring when a sample is missing or a result looks wrong. Publishing a named account contact, with hours and a direct route, is worth more to a busy practice than any marketing page and is usually what decides where the second referral goes.
Step 11: support the practice's own patients
Direct-to-patient services sit alongside referral work, as in home test kit questions patients ask before ordering.
Step 12: referral works the same across specialties
The pattern appears in private dermatology fees and referral questions, and checking your assistant against real enquiries is described in testing your assistant with real past enquiries.
Getting started
Publish your test menu, sample requirements, logistics and result delivery, then capture referrer enquiries separately at any hour. SpideyChat for healthcare organisations answers from your published pages and never interprets results. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.