Managing incoming referrals

Referrals are how other providers send patients your way. Ona gives you a fax number, receives the referrals, reads them, and tries to match each one to a patient — turning a stack of faxed PDFs into structured records.

The Referrals page

Go to Referrals in the left sidebar — "review, match patients, and convert referrals into patient records".

The Incoming Referrals page, showing the inbox and health panel — 1Referrals in the sidebar2Referral columns3Status4Referral inbox (fax number)5Inbox health

Each row shows the Patient name and date of birth, the Source (referring provider), a subject, Status, whether it's Linked to a patient, and when it was Received.

How referrals arrive

The Referral inbox panel on the right shows your dedicated fax number. Other providers fax referrals to it, and Ona "forwards referral PDFs from your existing source to this inbox to process them automatically". So an incoming fax doesn't sit as an image to retype — Ona reads it and creates a referral record.

Statuses and matching

Processed — Ona has read the referral.
Failed — it couldn't be read or processed.

Separately, Linked patient shows whether the referral has been matched to an existing patient record. A processed referral that isn't yet linked is waiting for you to confirm the match or create a new patient from it.

Review the match before converting, especially for common names. Ona proposes a link; a wrong match attaches one patient's referral to another's chart, which is worth a moment's care to avoid.

Inbox health

The Inbox health panel tracks the pipeline at a glance:

Processed — how many came through cleanly.
Failed — how many couldn't be processed.
Linked to patient — how many are matched.

Watch Failed. A failed referral is a patient your practice may not know is trying to reach it — worth checking the source fax and, if needed, entering it by hand rather than leaving it unprocessed.

Converting to a patient

Once a referral is reviewed and matched, convert it into a patient record — the handoff from an inbound document to an active patient you can book. From there the normal flow applies: Creating a patient record and Booking an appointment.

The fax number and email forwarding are configured under Settings → Fax & Referrals. The standalone Faxes section in the sidebar handles general faxing, separate from this referral-specific inbox.