When someone else can see your referral-to-appointment time
A new partnership routes patients to 160+ independent orthopedic practices. It also makes access speed something people outside the practice will notice.
Julie Soukup · Mon Oct 19 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
On October 13, Transcarent and the OrthoForum Value Network announced a partnership to expand access to orthopedic care through more than 160 independent practices in 47 states. Becker's Spine Review reported that it includes coordinated referrals, scheduling help and bundled surgical pricing. Transcarent handles benefits navigation and care coordination, and OVN physicians oversee treatment.
For independent groups, this is good news. It's a channel that brings patients to physician-owned practices instead of routing them elsewhere. But it also quietly changes something. When a navigation platform sends you a patient, someone outside your practice can now see how long it takes that patient to get an appointment.
Inside most practices, that number is invisible. I don't mean it's bad. I mean nobody can see it. A referral arrives by fax or portal. Someone keys it into the EHR, someone checks insurance, and someone calls the patient, maybe twice, maybe four times. If the patient doesn't call back, the referral sits in a queue until somebody closes it. The time from referral received to appointment scheduled is spread across all those hands, and nobody owns the whole span.
When we measured this at a 40-surgeon neurosurgical group, the baseline was about 53 days from referral to a scheduled appointment. We don't know if that's typical. That's exactly why we share it: there's almost no published baseline for independent surgical specialty groups, so every practice is comparing itself to a guess.
Navigation platforms, employers and health plans are increasingly in the business of steering patients. When they steer, they'll look at access. Days to appointment is the simplest access measure there is, and a partner can calculate it from their side whether or not you calculate it from yours. I'd rather a practice know its own number before a partner tells them.
What would you need to answer it? Mostly four things: the date each referral arrived, the date it was first touched, the date an appointment was scheduled (or the date and reason it was closed without one), and where the referral came from, so you can see whether some channels convert faster than others.
These sound easy. In practice, the first date is often the hardest. A fax that sits in a shared inbox for three days before anyone opens it doesn't get stamped when it arrives, so the clock starts late and the number looks better than it is.
The closing reason is close behind. At the same neurosurgical group, about 26% of referrals were closed with no reason recorded. That means the practice couldn't tell a patient who chose another surgeon from a patient who was never reached. Those are very different problems with very different fixes, and from the outside they look identical.
I'd also say this to any group thinking about joining a network like this one: the partnership doesn't change your intake process. The same fax line, the same queue and the same staff will handle the new referrals alongside the old ones. If the process is slow today, more volume makes it slower, not faster.
That's the case for measuring before you scale. Not with a new system on day one, but by counting the work you already do: how many touches a referral takes, where it waits, and where it falls out. Once that's visible, you can decide which steps are rules-based enough to automate and which need a person.
So my question for practice administrators this week is a plain one. From the day a referral arrives to the day the patient has a scheduled appointment, how many days is it in your practice? Not the goal, and not the best case. The median.
If you know it, I'd like to hear it, and I'll tell you how it compares with what we measured. If you don't, that's the finding, and it's where we'd start. Either way, reply or reach out.
Sources: Becker's Spine Review, "160+ orthopedic practices partner to expand surgery access," Oct. 13, 2026: https://www.beckersspine.com/orthopedic/160-orthopedic-practices-partner-to-expand-surgery-access/
