Question 1

Many referrals arrive as faxes or scanned PDFs. Can this still work?

Accepted Answer

Yes, that's the primary case, not an edge case. The agent reads the fax or scanned PDF the way a person would (referring provider, patient details, service requested, attached records) and creates the structured intake record directly, no fax-to-EDI gateway, no re-typing. One production deployment runs this at over 16,000 referrals a month, with roughly 22% converting straight through and the remainder routed to human review with the extracted data pre-filled.

Question 2

How do you match a referral to the right patient, provider, service, and destination?

Accepted Answer

Matching runs against your systems live: the patient against the EHR's records, the referring provider against your directory, the service against your intake rules for which clinic or queue owns it. Confidence thresholds are yours to set. Anything below them (a patient not yet in the EHR, a referral matching two charts) stops and routes to a person with the candidates shown, because a wrong-chart intake record is the one error this workflow must never make.

Question 3

What happens when a referral is incomplete, urgent, or fails safety screening?

Accepted Answer

Each has its own stop. Incomplete referrals route to review with the missing fields named and everything extractable pre-filled. Urgency and safety-critical answers (the emergency screening questions on triage portals) are never autonomously judged: they surface immediately to clinical staff by your escalation rules. The roughly 22% straight-through rate in production reflects exactly this design: the clean majority flows, and every referral that deserves eyes gets them with context attached.

Question 4

What happens when the referral portal or EHR workflow changes?

Accepted Answer

Portals and EHR intake screens are read live on each run, so layout changes are absorbed rather than breaking a recorded path. A restructured flow the agent can't complete stops with the step identified. Referrals queue rather than vanish, which is the failure mode that matters in intake. The workflow update is Asteroid's to make; your team sees an escalation and a fix, not a broken script to own.

Question 5

How are PHI, source documents, credentials, and audit history handled?

Accepted Answer

Referral documents are PHI from the first byte, so runs execute on HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type II infrastructure under a BAA, using your portal and EHR logins under least-privilege scoping. The source fax or PDF is preserved alongside the structured record it produced, with per-execution timestamps: provenance for every intake record, retrievable when a referring practice calls. The complete access posture is on the security page.

Question 6

What if a referral source or EHR we need is not in the library?

Accepted Answer

Sources are added by scoping the actual intake: map it in the builder with a handful of representative referrals, or have Asteroid build and run it managed. Fax queues, triage portals, e-consult platforms, and provider portals all reduce to the same read-extract-create pattern, so a new source inherits the matching thresholds and escalation rules your deployment already uses.

Capture every inbound referral.

Every inbound referral. Captured and structured.

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