Referrals stop living in a shared inbox and start moving through a board with an owner on every card. Each one that arrives, whether by email, fax, or a form on your site, is read, tagged by service and urgency as your practice defines it, assigned to the right provider queue, and given a clock so nothing sits for a week unnoticed.
Start from the Contact Flow Manager. It is a live Taskade Genesis app that turns anything arriving from outside into a structured record, which is the door a referral has to come through before it can be routed anywhere. It is a contact form, not a triage board. Clone it into your own workspace in about ten seconds, then add the service tags, the provider lanes, and the acknowledgement step behind it.
The build gives you a card per referral, the source it came from, extracted details from the letter or form, a service tag, an assigned queue, an acknowledgement step back to the referring office, and an AI agent that reads each document and proposes the routing with its reasoning shown. You approve or override, and the agent learns your corrections through persistent memory.
The board reads differently by role:
- Board view with a lane per provider or service line
- Table view for the full log with source, received date, and days waiting
- List view for a single queue when one person is clearing everything
- Calendar view to see acknowledgement deadlines by date
- Plus the rest of the 7 project views
Automations catch the referral at the door. On paid plans, Taskade automations create a card when a referral email lands via mailhook, assign the queue, send the acknowledgement to the referring office, and escalate anything untouched past your threshold. With 100+ bidirectional integrations, Gmail and web forms pull referrals in while Slack and email push assignments and acknowledgements out.
The AI agents carry 34 built-in tools including file analysis and web search. Reading a scanned referral letter into fields works the same way described in document intake, so a faxed page and a web form end up in the same structured card.
Workspace DNA turns a shared inbox into a process. Memory holds your routing rules, your service definitions, and every correction your team has made to a proposed tag. Intelligence, drawing on 15+ frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-weight providers, reads the letter and proposes the routing with its reasoning visible. Execution creates the card, acknowledges the sender, and escalates anything that stops moving.
Running it in your practice
- Name your lanes. One per provider, per service line, or both. The lanes should match how work is actually picked up rather than an org chart.
- Clone the board and point an address at it. Referrals arriving by email become cards without anyone forwarding anything.
- Write your tagging rules in plain language. Which service handles what, and what your practice defines as needing a faster queue.
- Set the acknowledgement. A short confirmation with a reference number, sent automatically on a paid plan, removes most of the chase calls from referring offices.
- Set an age threshold and honour it. Five days is common. What matters is that the board changes state rather than relying on somebody noticing.
The referring offices notice first, because they stop having to ring you to find out whether a letter arrived.
Clone it, invite the team, and the board belongs to your practice. The lanes, the tags, and the escalation thresholds are yours to define and redefine.
More: read automation actions for what happens after routing, browse the Community Gallery for boards other clinics run, or start at create. This pairs with turning scanned sheets into records when referrals arrive as paper, and with the intake backlog by visit date once routed referrals need scheduling.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a referral get into the board?
Any of three ways: an email address you point at the app, a form on your website, or an upload of a scanned letter. All three create the same card shape, so the board does not care how it arrived.
Does the agent decide clinical urgency?
No. It applies the administrative tags your practice defines, for example which service line a referral belongs to and whether it meets your own stated criteria for a faster queue. Clinical judgement stays with your clinicians, and every proposed tag is reviewable before it takes effect.
Can we acknowledge back to the referring office automatically?
Yes, on a paid plan. An acknowledgement action sends a short confirmation with a reference number when the card is created, which is usually the thing referring offices actually want.
What happens if a referral sits too long?
You set the threshold and the escalation. A card past its limit changes state, moves lane, and pings the owner or the manager. The days-waiting column in the table view makes the pattern obvious.
Can two providers share a queue?
Yes. A lane can have several owners, or you can split lanes by provider and use a shared unassigned lane that anyone can pull from. Both patterns work on the same board.
Will it handle referrals in a different format each time?
Yes. You describe the fields you want rather than a fixed layout, so different letterheads and different form designs still fill the same card. The agent gets better at recurring senders as it sees them.
Who can see the referral board?
Only invited members of your workspace. If a referring office needs visibility into status, publish a limited status page instead, as described in the patient intake status portal.
