Clinician Referral Engine — questions

That judgment belongs to your attorney, which is exactly why the program is built around a clearance gate rather than around a reassurance.

What we can tell you is how it is structured. The mail is education and access only — it says who you are, what you treat, and how to reach you, and it offers nothing of value in exchange for a referral. The fee is fixed and never linked to referral volume, because volume-linked pricing is the structure the anti-kickback rules exist to prevent. And the whole package is assembled for your own counsel to review before anything mails.

We build deliverables that are attorney-ready. We do not provide legal advice, and nothing we produce is "legally cleared."

The program stops. That is the gate working, not the gate failing.

Most objections are about specific wording rather than the whole approach, so in practice a "no" is usually a revision — counsel flags a phrase, the claim comes out of the registry or gets re-evidenced, and the packet goes back. But a real no is a real stop, and it is the reason your attorney reads the packet before anything is printed rather than after.

Those are the real alternatives, so here they are honestly, including where they beat this.

A physician liaison — someone whose job is walking into referring offices — is the strongest option if you can hire well and keep them busy. A person builds relationships software cannot. What you take on is a salary, a hiring problem in a thin market, and a single point of failure who takes the relationships with them when they leave. For scale: BLS does not track "physician liaison" as an occupation, and the nearest official series — technical and scientific sales representatives — had a median wage of $100,070 in May 2024, with the non-technical series at $66,780. Add payroll costs and a ramp on top of wherever in that range you land. Most practices at the size we work with are not ready to carry it. The two are not exclusive either: a liaison with a fit-ranked territory map and an engagement funnel is a liaison who knows which twelve doors to knock on this month.

A general healthcare-marketing agency will usually be better than us at your website, your paid search, and your brand. What you should check before signing is whether the compliance work is a discipline or a disclaimer: ask who reviews the mail before it goes out, what happens to a credential claim they cannot verify, and whether they will put tracking pixels on a healthcare site. Those questions are cheap to ask and the answers separate the field quickly.

Doing nothing is the alternative most practices actually choose, and it is not free — it just bills invisibly. Referrals keep arriving from whoever already knows you, which usually means a small number of sources you did not choose and cannot replace on demand.

Doing it yourself is entirely possible. The territory data is public. The work is pulling the registry, verifying every claim you want to print against a source document, getting counsel to review the package, and then doing it again every month with a list that rots. Practices rarely stop because it is hard; they stop because it is month four.

What this program is: infrastructure with the compliance argument built into the structure rather than added at the end. What it is not: a person who shakes hands, or a marketing department.

Because a fee that moves with referral volume is exactly the fee-splitting, anti-kickback-adjacent structure this engine exists to keep you away from — we never price per referral, in any form.

That is not a limitation we tolerate; it is the product working. The same rule gets built into your program — nothing of value changes hands for a referral — and our own pricing follows it: flat setup, flat retainer, and referral credits that are invoice credits, never cash. A vendor whose own compensation ignored the rule it sells you would be telling you something.

The public CMS NPPES registry — the federal database every licensed provider appears in. We build your territory map from it, then research every clinician on it individually: practice confirmed active, specialty focus, solo or group, telehealth posture. That research is delivered to you at setup as the Territory Report.

It is not a purchased list. You can audit where every record came from, which matters both for your peace of mind and for your attorney's review.

The clinicians most likely to refer to you, on the evidence — not the top of an alphabetical export.

The Territory Report scores every clinician on specialty fit, practice type, and proximity. Waves run best-fit first, and your engagement reporting reads by fit tier, so you can see whether the scoring is earning its keep rather than taking the sequencing on faith.

No, and no — and the second answer follows from the first rather than from a policy we promise to keep.

The system has no field for patient data to live in. That is enforced at four independent layers, so there is nowhere for it to be stored even by mistake. What the program works from is the public federal provider registry and business contact details for clinical practices: who practises where, what they specialise in, where their office receives mail. No patient identity, no clinical record, no appointment or claim data, at any point.

So there is no protected health information for a business associate agreement to govern, and none is required for the service as built. If your counsel or your own compliance posture wants one on file anyway, we will sign it — but read the architecture first, because a BAA over a system with no patient fields is paperwork rather than protection. What matters is the absence of the fields.

If you want patient targeting, this is the wrong product and we would tell you so on the call.

The mail carries a QR code that redirects to your site. The redirect records that a scan happened. It does not record an IP address, a raw user-agent, or a referrer — those columns do not exist in the schema rather than being filtered out after the fact.

Attribution comes from monthly CSV matchback against your intake data, which is why we call it spreadsheet-grade rather than pretending it is precise per-recipient tracking. The engagement funnel adds provider-side events — a scan, a click, a call to the dedicated line — and nothing else. Providers, never patients.

The per-provider funnel: mailed → scanned or clicked → called → referred, with a prioritized follow-up list of the clinicians showing engagement but no referral yet. That list is the most actionable page in the report — it is who to call this month.

What the reports never show is patient data, because none exists anywhere in the system, by construction. Provider-side events only.

The setup phase: the territory map built and researched clinician by clinician into your Territory Report, fit scoring and wave sequencing, your claims verified into the default-deny registry, the attorney-review packet assembled for your counsel, and the program stood up — QR redirect, dedicated provider line, matchback pipeline, suppression honored from the first piece.

Not included: website remediation, and legal advice or counsel — the reviewing attorney is yours.

Because bundling it hides the only line on the invoice you can independently check.

When production sits inside a retainer, you cannot tell what the mail cost and what the work cost, and neither can we without doing arithmetic nobody shows you. Split out, print and postage bill at cost with no markup, and the retainer is plainly what it is: the research, the compliance lane, the sequencing and the measurement. It is also the ordinary structure in this market — agency retainers exclude production almost universally. Ours used to be the exception, and the exception was not doing you any favours.

The practical effect is that your letter volume stops being a package tier and starts being a decision about your territory. If your counties hold four hundred clinicians worth reaching, you mail four hundred; you are not choosing between a hundred-piece box and a two-hundred-fifty-piece box that someone drew before seeing your map.

As many as your territory justifies — the number falls out of the map rather than being fixed in advance. That is the honest answer, and it replaces a real question the old tiers begged: why would a hundred be right for one practice and two hundred and fifty for another, when neither number came from either practice's territory?

What stays constant is the cadence and the discipline: fit-ranked waves, best-fit first, re-verified before every drop, measured monthly and read properly at day 90. Activation is what gets reported, against a denominator that is your actual territory rather than a purchased list.

It applies to Guided and Done for you, not to Territory Intelligence — that one is month to month, because a research subscription can be judged in a month and a mailing programme cannot.

Where it does apply, the reason is that activation is read at day 90, and judging clinician direct mail on a shorter window is how programs get called failures before their measurement exists.

The first waves mail in month one; the day-90 read on them lands in month three or four; months four through six are where follow-up on engaged providers compounds — or where an honest number tells you to stop. A shorter term would end the program before it could be evaluated honestly, and we would rather not sell that.

Every reachable one. Public sources do not yield a working email address for every clinician, which is one reason the email sequence reinforces the mail rather than replacing it — the letter reaches the desks email cannot.

Two design choices worth knowing: outreach email sends from a dedicated secondary domain, never from your practice's primary domain, so your operational email reputation is not on the line; and addresses are verified before anything sends.

Deliberately bounded. Personalization is a small set of pre-approved, specialty-appropriate variants, and every one of them passes the same claims review as the letter.

There is no free-text AI writing per recipient, anywhere. Uniqueness would defeat the review gate that makes the program safe — your counsel reviews a finite set of artifacts, and what sends is provably one of them. Bounded is not a compromise; it is the property that keeps the clearance meaningful.

No, and the distinction matters more than any other sentence on this site.

20 is the target the program is built and sequenced around — the number of clinicians we scope the territory work, the wave plan and the follow-up list to put in front of you. It is not a forecast, there is no make-good attached to it, and it is not what a territory "usually" returns, because nothing has mailed yet and we publish no rate for anything.

It also counts a conversation, not a referral. A clinician is in your referral network once you have sat down with them; whether they then send you a patient is their decision and appears separately, at day 90, as an activated referrer. Anyone who blurs those two is selling you the second while delivering the first.

No. Nobody honestly can, and the day a vendor promises you referrals is the day to stop taking them seriously. That holds for the network number too: we will tell you how many clinicians we are building the program to reach and sit you in front of, and we will never tell you how many of them will refer.

What is backed is the process. On Done for you, the setup guarantee: attorney-review packet assembled and your first wave mailed within 4 weeks of intake sign-off — counsel review time excluded, your intake back within 10 business days — or the setup fee is refunded. And if your day-60 report shows zero engagement events, we cover wave 3's print and postage. Gates, timelines, and remedies; never outcomes.

Those two are promises about dates and sends we control, so they apply where we do the mailing. On Guided you mail on your own schedule and we do not promise a date you set; on Territory Intelligence nothing mails at all. The rest of the discipline — the claims registry, the counsel gate, the byte-checked artifact — is identical whichever way you buy.

Refer a practice that signs, and two things happen: you get half your own setup fee back as an invoice credit, and they get half off theirs. It runs on all three plans, and every referral counts rather than just the first.

Each side's credit is sized by its own plan, never by the other's — referring someone who signs for a larger plan does not earn you more, and that is deliberate. A referral scheme that paid more for steering someone into a bigger contract would be a different kind of arrangement, and not one we would want to explain. Credits apply after the referred practice's first paid invoice.

It is credits-never-cash on purpose. A program built to keep referral relationships clean does not hand anyone an envelope of cash for one — that posture applies to us too.

Because it is checked rather than promised. The renderer is byte-reproducible — the same inputs produce the identical artifact every time — and the artifact that mails is verified against the one that was reviewed.

This sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between a clearance that means something and a clearance that describes a document nobody can prove still exists in that form.

No language model sits anywhere in the compliance or send path. The gates are deterministic.

A compliance guarantee is unsupportable if the thing enforcing it can be talked out of a finding, so the enforcement is code with fixed rules, and every finding carries a stable rule ID that stays quotable in a counsel answer years later. The same thinking bounds personalization: pre-approved variants only, so review always covers exactly what sends.

By checking the parts that can be checked, which is most of them.

The price is published, so there is no discovery process designed to find out what you will tolerate. The fee is flat and never moves with referral counts, which is the compliance structure the program exists to hold — and the same rule we apply to your program governs ours. Nothing mails until your own attorney clears it, so the judgment that matters most is made by someone you already trust and pay, not by us.

Then the part that is hardest to fake: the system is built to be inspected. Claims are default-deny and checked against source documents, so a fact about your practice that is true but unverified does not print. The renderer proves the document your attorney read is byte-for-byte the document that mails. The compliance rules are tested against a corpus of 9,756 real clinician records rather than hand-written examples — which is how we know a naive title-matching rule would have addressed 24 clinicians with a credential they do not hold and withheld an earned one from 522 others. The gates caught it before it reached a mailbox.

That is the argument for the work, and it is checkable in a way a testimonial is not. What you should not accept from anyone in this market is a promise of referrals. We hold your claims to a standard of stated-only-if-verified; it would be strange to exempt our own.

Your territory and target counties, your credentials and licences so they can be verified against the certificates or board lookups, your contact details for the letter, your suppression list of anyone who must never be mailed, and an attorney who can review the packet.

Two clocks to know about. Verification is the slowest part and the part clients underestimate — nothing prints about you until it has been checked against a source document, and your own website is not evidence. And the setup guarantee assumes your claims and suppression intake comes back within 10 business days; the four weeks start from your intake sign-off.