Your Liaisons Can’t Visit Every Referring Physician. Here’s How to Reach the Rest.

If you run marketing or physician relations for a cancer center, a heart program or a specialty practice, you already know where most of your new patients come from. They come because another clinician sent them. A primary care physician, a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant decided your program was the right place for their patient. Growing a service line is, in large part, the work of earning and keeping that trust.

Most organizations do that work well. They also run into the same wall sooner or later. There are simply more referring providers than any team can reach.

This post looks at what most referral growth programs do today, where that work runs out of room, and how NPI targeting gives you a practical way to reach the providers your team can’t get to.

The playbook most teams run

Talk to ten physician relations teams and you’ll hear a familiar approach. Liaisons visit referring offices on a set rhythm, with the top referrers seen monthly and everyone else quarterly or less. One widely used industry playbook suggests 14 to 16 scheduled physician visits per liaison per week (Optum). Behind those visits sits a CRM or physician relationship management tool, often fed by market claims data, that helps the team decide whom to see and who may be drifting toward a competitor (Becker’s Hospital Review).

Good programs also work hard to make referring easy. They set up a dedicated referral line, speed up new patient appointments and close the loop with the referring physician after the visit (AHRQ). And they educate, through CME events, specialist talks, newsletters and updates about new physicians and services (WebMD Ignite).

None of this is wrong. Relationships still drive referrals. When primary care physicians choose a specialist, the factors that matter most include their past experience with that specialist, how quickly the patient can be seen, how well the specialist communicates back, and whether the patient comes back to primary care afterward (NIH/PMC). A good liaison program is built around exactly those things.

Where the playbook runs out of room

The challenge is arithmetic. At 14 to 16 visits a week, one liaison makes roughly 650 to 750 scheduled visits a year. That sounds like a lot until you compare it with the size of a typical referral base. Penn Medicine once counted about 20,000 referring physicians, and 75% of them sent five patients or fewer a year. Reaching all of them in person would have taken hundreds of liaisons (Penn Medicine case study).

So teams prioritize, as they should. The physicians who send the most patients, or who could send many more, get the visits. But that leaves a long tail of referring providers who rarely hear from you at all. They may never learn that you added two oncologists, opened a new site closer to their office, or cut the wait for a new patient appointment in half. When one of their patients needs care you offer, they send that patient where they’ve always sent them.

Physician relations leaders feel this pressure. In a benchmark survey of liaison programs, the top challenges they named were access to meaningful data, access to and time with physicians, and measuring return on investment (SHSMD/AAPL). Every one of those is a version of the same problem: too many physicians, not enough hours.

What NPI targeting is, in plain English

Every licensed clinician in the United States has a National Provider Identifier, or NPI. It’s a public, 10-digit number listed in a federal registry, along with each provider’s specialty and practice location.

NPI targeting uses that number to show your message to specific, named providers on the websites, apps and video they already use. You start by deciding who should hear from you. For example, that might be every primary care physician, NP and PA within 30 miles of your new cancer center, minus the providers employed by a competing system. That list of NPIs becomes a digital audience, matched to each professional’s digital presence, so your message reaches those people instead of a broad “healthcare” audience. Your message then runs across display, online video and connected TV at a steady frequency over several months.

The part most teams have never had for digital media comes next. You see who was reached and who engaged, by name and NPI. That turns digital outreach from a guess into something your physician relations team can actually use.

Because physician targeting is built on professional identifiers rather than patient records, it’s compliant and privacy-safe, and it never involves PHI.

How it fits with what you already do

The easiest way to think about NPI targeting is as air cover for your field team. It doesn’t replace the visit. It makes each visit more effective.

Before a liaison walks into an office, the physician has already seen your message about the new specialist or the faster access line, so the conversation starts further along. Between visits, the long tail of providers your team can’t reach still hears from you every month instead of never. And once a campaign is running, the named-provider report shows which providers engaged, which helps liaisons decide which offices to visit next.

It also fills in what your other channels can’t do. Your referral data tells you whom to reach, but not how to reach them at scale. Newsletters are direct and inexpensive, but they compete in crowded inboxes and tell you little about who read them. CME events offer deep education to a small number of attendees a few times a year. Your brand campaign builds reputation with patients, but it isn’t aimed at referrers. NPI targeting adds a physician-facing layer that works alongside all of them, including your agency’s brand work.

Relevance matters here. Two-thirds of physicians say they’re bombarded with generic digital content and want personalized information, such as short videos (McKinsey). The messages that work best for referrers are practical ones: a new specialist they should know, a faster way to get patients seen, or a simpler way to refer.

What it isn’t

It’s worth being clear about the limits. NPI targeting isn’t a replacement for relationships. Referrals still follow trust, access and communication. It isn’t a brand campaign either, because it speaks to referring providers about things they can act on. And it isn’t a promise. Media doesn’t create referrals by itself. The right way to judge it is in your own systems, by comparing referrals from the providers you reached against a baseline you set before launch.

Where to start

If you’re considering this for a service line, start with a handful of questions. Which referring providers matter most to this service line, and how many are there? Which ones have gone quiet in the past year? What do you need them to know: a new physician, a new location, faster access, a new program? Which providers should be left out, such as physicians employed by a competitor? And how will you measure success: which referral and new patient numbers, from which system, and against what baseline?

If your team can answer those, you’re ready to talk about a pilot.

In the next post, we’ll look at a question many teams can’t answer yet: which physicians have slowed down or stopped referring to you, and where their patients went instead.

DigiVidBio has run NPI-targeted campaigns with named-provider reporting for medtech and life science clients (Kuros case study) and applies that craft to service lines.

Curious what a named-provider report actually looks like? Email Kelley to request an anonymized sample and see how reach and engagement are reported by provider name and NPI.

‍Q&A:Your Liaisons Can’t Visit Every Referring Physician. Here’s How to Reach the Rest.

If our liaisons already cover our top referrers, what are we missing?

At Penn Medicine, 75% of about 20,000 referring physicians sent five or fewer patients a year, far more than any field team can visit.

How does digital outreach make a liaison visit more productive?

The physician has already seen your message about the new specialist or faster access before the liaison walks in, so the conversation starts further along. The named-provider report also shows which offices engaged, which helps decide where the next visit should go.

What message works best with referring providers?

One they can act on: a new specialist, a location closer to their office, faster new patient access or a simpler way to refer. Two-thirds of physicians say they are bombarded with generic digital content, so practical relevance is what earns attention.

How do we measure impact without overstating it?

Set a referral and new patient baseline in your own systems before launch, then compare referrals from the providers you reached against it. Media supports referral growth, and your own data is where that shows up.

Should NPs and PAs be on the list?

Yes. They refer patients too, and each has an NPI, so they can be reached by name alongside primary care physicians.