Direct vs Choice, and which to use

The Referral type toggle sits at the top of the Recipients block on the referral form, and it offers two options.

Direct sends the referral to one specific provider on the referred person's behalf. You confirm you have their consent as part of sending, and a recipient already on Syncroly can open the full referral straight away. A practice not on Syncroly yet is invited, and opens it after setting up its profile.

The other option hands the choice to the person you referred: they see the recipients you picked and decide who to send it to. It is named for the category. Dental and mental health referrals call it Patient Choice, veterinary referrals call it Owner Choice, and the General category calls it Choice.

The question-mark button beside the toggle gives you the same two lines inside the app, at the moment you are choosing.

A Direct referral goes to exactly one recipient, because you are consenting on the referred person's behalf and that consent names one practice.

Because you are acting for them, the send carries an attestation. The line above the buttons states that you are confirming consent, and the button reads Confirm and send referral rather than Send referral. Syncroly records who confirmed it and when.

The recipient sees the full referral as soon as they open it. The person you referred still gets their own secure link, with the recipient shown and a map, so they can book.

A Choice referral holds more than one recipient, and none of them sees the referral when you send it; a practice not on Syncroly yet gets an invitation to join, not the referral. What goes out is the link to the person you referred. They accept a consent disclosure, see the practices you selected side by side with a phone number, a website, and a map, and share the referral with the one they want.

A practice receives the referral at the moment it is shared with them, and it arrives complete. Until then it is not in their inbox at all, and there is nothing for them to look at: Syncroly does not show a receiving practice a partial record while consent is pending. Why you can't see the patient's details yet is the guide to send a recipient who is expecting one and cannot find it.

The Recipients block is what tells you how many it will take. Add recipients until it stops accepting them: at that point the search box reports the maximum added in place of its placeholder, and every row in the results reads Limit reached.

Either type accepts a recipient who is not on Syncroly yet. Search for them, and when nothing usable comes back the picker offers to add them as an external contact from a name and an email address. On a Choice referral that practice gets a general invitation to join Syncroly when you send, and the referral itself stays private until the person shares it with them; on a Direct referral the email says a referral is waiting, and they see it once they set up their profile.

Two things decide it: whether you already have consent in hand, and whether the choice of practice is yours or theirs.

Use Direct when you are referring to one particular provider, the person has agreed to it in front of you, and you want the receiving practice working on it today. This is the standard case for a specialist you refer to regularly.

Use Choice when any of several practices would do and location, hours, or insurance should decide; when you want the person to give their own consent rather than attesting for them; or when you are referring somebody you have not spoken to face to face.

You can move the toggle as often as you like before you send.

Going from Direct to Choice keeps the recipient you already added and opens the remaining slots. Going the other way has to drop recipients, because Direct holds one, so Syncroly asks first: Switch to Direct? names the recipients it will drop and the one it will keep, and you answer Continue or Cancel. An external contact can be the one it keeps.

The referral type is one of the things a post-send correction cannot change. You can fix a name, an email address, the notes, the reason, and the clinical details, but not the type and not the recipients. If you sent the wrong type, the fix is a new referral.

One move is available on a sent Choice referral. On its detail page, each recipient carries a send action: use it and the referral goes to that practice immediately, with a consent dialog asking you to confirm you have consent to share before Confirm & Send. It is the attestation Direct makes, applied to one recipient after the fact. The referral stays a Choice referral, the other recipients keep their place, and nothing is marked as booked.

The status you watch is the same either way. A referral opens as Sent, becomes Viewed when the person opens their link and accepts the disclosure, In Progress when a receiving practice records that it reached out, and Booked when an appointment is confirmed. On a Choice referral, Sent sitting still for a few days usually means the person has not opened their link, not that the practices are ignoring you.