Send your first referral

Three things:

• A name and an email address for the person you are referring. The email is how their referral link reaches them, so it has to be one they read.
• Who you are referring to. A provider, a practice, or, on a Choice referral, a contact who is not on Syncroly yet.
• A reason. You pick it from a list, so you do not have to phrase it from scratch.

Everything else on the form is optional. You can also stop partway and finish later.

There is one form behind every category, and only the clinical part of it changes: a tooth chart for dental, animal details for veterinary, risk factors for mental health, notes alone for the General category. Everything described below behaves the same whichever one you see.

The first block on the form carries the contact details, and its title follows your category: Patient Details for dental and mental health, Owner's Information for veterinary, Contact Details for the General category.

If you are not a clinician yourself, and your practice has more than one clinician who could be the referring provider, a Sending as picker appears in the same block. Open it, choose a provider, and that is who the recipient and the person you referred will see as the referring provider. You choose it per referral, so it is not a setting you have to maintain. With exactly one eligible clinician at the practice, Syncroly selects them for you and the picker stays hidden.

Changing the specialty refreshes the reasons, and the form says so under the picker. A reason you already selected does not survive the change, so set the specialty first.

General category referrals have a single specialty and no picker at all: the form goes straight from contact details to recipients.

The Recipients block carries two controls: a Referral type toggle, and the search box under it.

The toggle is the decision that shapes everything else. Direct sends the referral to one recipient on the referred person's behalf, and you confirm their consent as part of sending. The other option lets the person you referred pick from the recipients you chose. It is named for the category: Patient Choice on dental and mental health, Owner Choice on veterinary, Choice on the General category. Select the question-mark button beside the toggle for the same summary in the app, and Direct vs Choice, and which to use for the full comparison.

A row marked Unavailable is a clinician who has switched off new referrals in their own settings, and the picker will not let you add them. Their practice has no such switch, so the practice row can still be selectable: if you need that specific clinician, add the practice and name them in a note.

Load Shortlist fills the recipients from the shortlist you saved for that specialty, so a routine referral needs no typing.

When the search finds nobody usable, a Choice referral offers to add the practice as an external contact instead, which is how you refer to somebody who is not on Syncroly yet.

The clinical block is the part of the form that is genuinely different per category, and it is optional in every one of them. A dental referral offers a tooth chart, a veterinary referral the animal details, a mental health referral the risk factors. The General category has notes only.

Files upload while the form is still open, so a large X-ray is moving before you finish typing. A form you abandon leaves no files behind.

If you have the person on the phone and only half the referral in front of you, select Save as draft. The draft is shared inside your practice, so a colleague can open it and finish the clinical half. After that first save the form saves itself as you work, and the button goes away.

The send button names what it is about to do. On a Direct referral it reads Confirm and send referral, and a line above it states that you are confirming you have consent to share the referral. Sending records that you confirmed it. On a Choice referral the button reads Send referral and there is no attestation, because the person you referred gives their own consent on their own link.

If your practice requires a clinician to send, and you are not one, the button reads something else and the referral goes to the clinician you named rather than out to the recipients. See Send a referral for clinician review.

Syncroly opens the referral you sent, or the Referrals Sent list when you sent it in a colleague's name, and three things happen without you doing anything else.

The person you referred gets a secure link by email. They accept a consent disclosure, then see the recipients you chose with an address, a phone number, a website, and a map.

On a Direct referral, the recipient is notified straight away and can open the full referral, because your attestation is the consent. Everyone else at the receiving practice who should see it is notified too.

On a Choice referral, no recipient learns anything yet. The referral reaches a practice only when the person shares it with them, or when you send it to one of them yourself later.

The referral is now in Referrals Sent in your sidebar, marked Sent. It changes on its own as things happen: Viewed once the person opens the link and accepts the disclosure, In Progress once a receiving practice records that it reached out, Booked when an appointment is confirmed.

Its detail page carries a Summary of what you sent, a Recipients card, a Conversations card for messaging the receiving practice, and an Activity History that timestamps every step. If you got something wrong, Update details on that page corrects it after the fact without cancelling or duplicating the referral.