Referral management is the front door of specialty care. Most front doors are broken. This episode of Scaling Specialty Growth gets into why: fragmented workflows, no real data, and a process that hasn't been digitized despite decades of EHR adoption everywhere else. Joe Zboch sits down with Chris Poole, CEO of Hatch, to pull apart why specialty practices are still muscling referrals through with bodies, and what it actually costs them.

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Chris brings a rare combination of venture capital experience, early-stage healthcare startup operations, and a front-row seat to the referral data problem through Hatch's work with leading specialty groups. This conversation covers the gap between what executives think they know about their referral pipeline and what the data, if they had it, would actually show.

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👤 Guest Bio

Chris Poole is CEO of Hatch, the referral management platform built for specialty care. Before Hatch, he served as Managing Director at 25m Health, a LifePoint Health-backed venture studio, and as CFO of MetaPhy Health, a virtual care company serving gastroenterology practices. He also spent years as a Principal at Solidus Company, LP, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on healthcare. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why specialty practice CEOs consistently overestimate the quality and completeness of their referral data, and what they're actually working with
• The "muscling referrals through with bodies" problem: how front offices absorb broken infrastructure with manual labor
• Why the EHR has never been the right tool for referral management, and what it actually costs per referral to work around that ($30 on average, more for workers' comp)
• How slow patient outreach, days or weeks after the referral is made, kills referral-to-appointment conversion before the team even gets to the phone call
• What referral leakage looks like in practice: groups reaching out twice and stopping, leaving pools of unconverted patients untouched
• The case for a referral-first architecture: why referral management has to be the core product, not a feature bolted onto an EHR or patient engagement tool
• Hatch's current results: 30% reduction in administrative time per referral today, with a target of 50%+ by the end of the year, and full automation of a subset of referrals in development
• How private digital access doors and co-branded referral portals create VIP access lanes for employers and high-value referring partners

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Hatch, the referral management platform discussed throughout
• Joe Zboch on LinkedIn
• Chris Poole on LinkedIn