What a referral packet actually contains
Bosshh · Jun 22, 2026
Most of a referral does not determine whether you can admit. A short list does, and it is usually the part that is missing.
A home health referral arrives as a stack: discharge summary, medication reconciliation, physician orders, face-to-face documentation, insurance card scans, sometimes a wound photo, sometimes the same page three times at different resolutions. Forty pages is normal. Pages out of order is normal. A fax of a photocopy of a signature is normal.
An intake coordinator does not read all of it. They look for a specific short list, because that list is what determines whether an admission is possible and billable: is there a valid signed physician order, is there documented face-to-face contact within the required window, who is certifying and what is their NPI, what is the coverage and does it need prior authorisation, what is the homebound justification, and what disciplines were ordered at what frequency.
Everything else is context that matters clinically but does not gate the decision.
So that is what our extraction establishes first, and it reports each item explicitly — including, and especially, when the item is absent. "No signature date found on the order" is a more actionable output than a tidy record with a plausible date in it.
Two behaviours took the most care to get right.
The first is conflict handling. When page three and page eleven disagree about a date of birth, the useful output is both readings plus a flag, not a confident pick. Quietly choosing one is how a wrong identifier ends up on a claim months later, and it is exactly the kind of error that is invisible until it is expensive.
The second is refusing to tidy. An illegible date stays null with a note rather than becoming an ISO string. A name stays as written rather than being normalised into something more standard-looking. Doses and identifiers come through verbatim. Cleaning up messy source data feels like helpfulness and is actually a loss of information — the coordinator needs to know the document is ambiguous, because that is what tells them to pick up the phone.