GPs write Team Care Arrangement referrals to your practice. Patients call to book. If you don't answer, they don't follow through—and the GP stops referring. The phone is your revenue link.
A GP identifies a patient with diabetes, heart disease, COPD, or another chronic condition covered by Medicare's Team Care Arrangement (TCA). The GP writes a referral to an exercise physiologist. The patient walks out with a referral slip and your practice details.
Now what happens?
The patient needs to call you to book their first appointment. They're not highly motivated—the GP sent them, so there's an external push, but the patient might still be uncertain. They might not fully understand what exercise physiology is. They might have questions.
So they pick up the phone. And if you answer—warm, professional, knowledgeable—they book. If you don't, something else happens.
The Economics: A TCA referral entitles the patient to 5 Medicare-funded sessions at $150-180 per session, totalling $750-900 per referral. That's pure revenue for a 5-session episode of care. And if the patient continues beyond those 5 sessions, it's even more.
Here's the problem: The patient gets the referral, goes home, and calls your practice. Your receptionist is managing appointments, insurance enquiries, patient check-ins, possibly seeing patients if you're a small practice. The phone is another task competing for attention.
If you're on a call, the patient goes to voicemail. Now they have to wait for you to call back. But the referral motivation is low—the patient didn't initiate this. The GP did. By the time you call back, the patient might have moved on.
Or they call back and you're still busy. Now there's friction. They have to try again. They get discouraged. They don't call again.
And here's the kicker: The GP is watching. The GP sent 5 referrals to you last month. How many of those patients actually followed through? If it's only 2 out of 5, the GP notices. They'll start sending referrals elsewhere—to the practice that answers the phone and gets patients booked.
GPs are the primary referral source for exercise physiology. They're literally your sales channel. If you serve them well—if you answer their referrals, get patients booked, provide good outcomes—they send more referrals. If you don't, they stop.
The phone is where GPs judge your reliability. They don't see your clinical outcomes immediately. But they can see whether their referred patients actually make it to an appointment. If the answer is "some do, some don't," the GP assumes it's your fault, not the patient's.
So the phone becomes a competitive advantage. The EP practice that answers every referral call and gets the patient booked on the spot will get more GP referrals than the one that lets calls go to voicemail.
Even if the patient does get through to you and books an appointment, there's another friction point: follow-up. After the first session, you might need to confirm the next appointment, check in on their progress, or address any questions they have.
If your phones are always busy, the patient can't get through. They might miss their appointment. They might not return. And once again, the GP sees that their referral didn't result in a completed episode of care.
The phone is the thread that holds the entire referral chain together. Lose it, and you lose referrals.
Option 1: Hire a dedicated person to handle GP referral calls. Expensive, but if they're focused solely on answering referral calls and booking TCA patients, they could pay for themselves with 4-5 referrals per week (that's $150,000+ annually in revenue).
Option 2: Add a phone line. Reduces congestion, but doesn't solve understaffing. And if both lines go to voicemail, it doesn't help.
Option 3: Use a system that catches referral calls. A system that answers every referral call, captures the patient's information, confirms the TCA referral details, books the appointment, and hands off a warm summary to your team. The patient gets booked. The GP sees that their referral converted. Your team focuses on therapy delivery.
The ROI is clear: If a system costs $300-500/month and secures just 2 additional referrals per month due to better answering (that might have otherwise been lost), you've paid for the system 3-5 times over in revenue.
Exercise physiology is a referral-dependent business. You're not marketing directly to patients—you're marketing to GPs. And the way you market to GPs is by proving that you catch their referrals and deliver results.
The phone is your first proof point. Answer it, and you earn more referrals. Miss it, and you earn a reputation for being unreliable.
Make sure every GP referral call gets answered. Make sure every patient gets booked. Make sure every TCA episode gets completed. That's how you build a referral practice that grows year over year.
At CallSorted.ai, we help exercise physiology practices ensure that every GP referral call gets answered and every TCA patient gets booked—even when your team is in sessions. You catch the referral, protect the GP relationship, and grow your referral stream. Let's talk about how it works.