Most referral teams work from a list someone built years ago: the hospitals everyone knows, a few physician groups, and whoever the last marketer had a relationship with. The trouble is that the list quietly goes stale. Discharge planners change jobs, practices merge, and new facilities open down the road. If a source isn't on your list, nobody visits it, and nobody notices what you're missing.
The good news is that the raw material for a complete list is public and free. Here's how to build one.
Step 1: Start from your offices, not your county
Referral patterns follow drive time, not county lines. Write down the address of each office you staff from, then decide on a realistic radius for each one, based on how far your clinicians will travel and how far your marketers can drive in a day. A suburban home health office and a rural hospice will have very different answers.
Everything that follows gets filtered by distance from these points.
Step 2: Pull physicians and organizations from the NPI Registry
Every individual clinician and healthcare organization that bills in the US has a National Provider Identifier. CMS publishes the full registry through NPPES, the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System. You can search it online at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov, or download the full file, which is refreshed monthly.
Each record carries a practice address and one or more taxonomy codes that describe what the provider does. Those codes are how you turn a list of millions into the few hundred that matter to you. A few that referral teams commonly start with:
- 207Q00000X Family Medicine and 207R00000X Internal Medicine: the primary care physicians who refer patients home after a hospital stay or as needs grow.
- 208M00000X Hospitalist: often involved when a patient is being discharged.
- 251B00000X Case Management: agencies that coordinate care and can route patients to you.
Add the specialties that fit your service line, such as cardiology and pulmonology for home health, oncology for hospice, or psychiatry for behavioral health. Then keep only records whose practice address falls inside your radius.
Step 3: Add facilities from CMS Care Compare
Hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies and hospices that take Medicare are listed on Care Compare, and the underlying datasets are downloadable from the CMS Provider Data Catalog. Each facility comes with an address, ownership details and a CMS Certification Number you can use to match it across datasets.
Facilities matter for two reasons. They're where discharge planners and social workers sit, and many of them are two-way partners: you send patients to them and they send patients to you.
Step 4: Fill in the sources that aren't in any database
Public data won't show you everything. Senior centers, faith communities, elder law attorneys, geriatric care managers, assisted living communities that don't bill Medicare, and employer benefit programs can all be strong referral sources, especially for private-pay home care. Add these by hand, and ask your intake team where the last fifty referrals actually came from. Their answers often surprise people.
Step 5: De-duplicate and tag every source
The same hospital will appear under several names and addresses, and a physician can list more than one practice location. Merge records that share an NPI or a CMS Certification Number, then give every source a type: hospital, physician office, nursing facility, rehab, case management, community. That tag drives how you prioritize and what kind of outreach each one gets.
Step 6: Match the list against your own referrals
A territory list becomes useful when you lay your own referral history over it. Export the last twelve months of referrals from your intake or care software, match each one to a source on the list, and you'll immediately see three groups: partners who send you patients regularly, partners who used to and stopped, and sources who have never sent you anyone. Each group needs a different plan.
Keeping it current
Re-run the pull every quarter. The NPI file changes every month, facilities open and close, and people move between organizations. A list that updates itself is the difference between a territory map and a snapshot.
This is the work Wellby is built to automate: it maps every source around each office from public data, matches it to the referrals you already receive, and keeps the list current. But the method above works with a spreadsheet and an afternoon.
