~10,000
faxes per month
Referral documents arrive at volume and must be read, matched, and turned into records.
Intake transformation vision · August 2026
A connected path from referral to care.
A proposed intake experience for Hopebridge—designed to give families clearer next steps, teams one shared workflow, and leadership the visibility to improve access to care.
- Clearer family journey
- Families know what happens next, who is helping, and what is still needed.
- One operational workflow
- Intake, clinical, and authorization work from a shared queue instead of tickets.
- Actionable leadership visibility
- Time-in-stage, capacity signals, and source attribution in one view.
Proposed path
- 01
Referral
Web, phone, fax, provider
- 02
Validation
Complete + qualified
- 03
Evaluation
ABA, speech, OT
- 04
Authorization
Benefits + approval
- 05
Ready for care
Scheduled start
Illustrative journey model. Stage names and gates to be confirmed in solution design.
What we heard
The opportunity sits between demand and the start of care.
Hopebridge’s specialty clinical platform today is TotalABA, a roughly ten-year-old Salesforce-based application carrying extensive customization and accumulated technical debt. It holds clinical work well enough to run the business, but it was never designed as a front-door coordination layer.
As a result, intake handoffs are fragmented. Referrals land through many channels, qualification and diagnosis are tracked in different places, and progress between gates frequently relies on manually created tickets. Families feel that seam as repeated questions and quiet waiting periods.
Hopebridge has already moved in the right direction with a new AI-assisted record-creation tool for incoming documents—strong evidence that the constraint is coordination, not effort. The open question is where intake should live while the specialty EMR decision is still in motion: repair the current environment, replace it wholesale, or separate intake into a dedicated layer.
Source note: Based on the July 31 discovery conversation. Quantities and workflows to be validated in solution design. Organization scale to validate.
Manual
ticket handoffs
Movement between intake, diagnosis, evaluation, and authorization often depends on a person creating a ticket.
5+
referral channels
Web forms, email, phone, physician and insurance referrals, and fax each enter differently.
Partial
intake coverage in EMR options
Among the specialty EMR finalists discussed, intake capability is incomplete.
The shared path
One journey, shared across teams.
Same referral, same record, same language—whether the next step belongs to intake, a clinician, or an authorization specialist. Select a stage to see what happens, who owns it, and how progress reads.
Stage 2 of 7
Validation
The referral is checked for completeness and qualification: child and caregiver details, location and service availability, coverage basics, and documentation already on file.
Exception & rework loop: If information is missing, the record stays visible in a follow-up queue with a defined next contact rather than falling out of view.
- Owner / team
- Intake team
- Example status
- Awaiting missing information
- Note
- Proposed future-state design. Ownership and statuses to be confirmed with Hopebridge operations and clinical leadership.
Proposed future state
Three audiences, one coordinated experience.
The same orchestration layer serves the family, the teams doing the work, and the leaders accountable for access to care—without asking any of them to learn someone else’s system.
Families
- A clear next step at every stage—what is happening now and what is needed from them
- Fewer repeated questions, because information already provided stays attached to the referral
- Timely updates during diagnosis, evaluation, authorization, and waitlist waiting periods
Intake & care teams
- A shared queue instead of tickets, inboxes, and side spreadsheets
- Guided work with the next action, owner, and due date visible on each referral
- Less manual re-entry as documents and records flow between systems
Leadership
- Conversion from referral to therapy start, by source and by center
- Time-in-stage across validation, evaluation, and authorization
- Capacity and demand signals to guide staffing and access-to-care decisions
Future-state design proposed by SmartBug Media. Capabilities described here are a design intent, not a description of Hopebridge’s current systems.
Solution blueprint
An intake layer that connects, rather than competes.
Demand enters through many channels, is coordinated in one orchestration layer, and is executed in the systems that already own the work.
Where demand arrives
Inputs
Web forms
Site, campaigns, landing pages
Phone & email
Call center and shared inboxes
Fax + AI extraction
~10k/month, AI-assisted record creation
Providers & payers
Physician and insurance referrals
Where intake is coordinated
HubSpot intake orchestration
Contact & child household model
Caregiver, child, relationships
Referral record
Source, stage, gates, documentation status
Workflows
Routing, gate logic, escalation, SLA timers
Communications
Family updates across preferred channels
Tasking
Shared queues with owners and due dates
Reporting
Stage timing, conversion, attribution
Where the work is executed and recorded
Connected systems
Selected clinical EMR
Authoritative clinical record
Document / AI service
Classification and extraction
Telephony
Call logging and outcomes
Payer & eligibility services
Benefits and authorization data
Analytics
Enterprise reporting and BI
Design principle
HubSpot coordinates intake; the clinical EMR remains the authoritative clinical record.
Boundary note
Final system boundaries depend on EMR selection and compliance review. PHI scope, data residency, and BAA coverage are confirmed before any integration is designed in detail.
Measurement
What becomes measurable.
When the journey lives in one place, each gate produces a number. These are the measures we would establish first—baselines captured in Phase 0, targets agreed with Hopebridge leadership.
Illustrative sample measures — no values shown
Referral-to-validation time
How quickly a new referral becomes a qualified, workable record.
BaselineTarget
Days in authorization
Aging from submission to payer decision, including rework loops.
BaselineTarget
Evaluation completion rate
Share of referrals completing all required evaluations by service line.
BaselineTarget
Waitlist aging
Distribution of time waiting for a capacity match, by center.
BaselineTarget
Conversion to therapy start
Referrals that reach a confirmed first session.
BaselineTarget
Source-to-start attribution
Which channels produce families who actually begin care.
BaselineTarget
Phased path to value
Value early, scale deliberately.
Each phase produces something usable, so intake improves before the EMR decision is fully settled.
Phase 0
Align
2–3 weeks
- Workflow mapping across intake, clinical, and authorization
- Data and PHI boundary definition
- Integration inventory for current and candidate systems
- Success measures and baseline capture
Phase 1
Prove
6–8 weeks
- One region or service line as the proving ground
- Prioritized referral sources connected end to end
- Core stages live from capture through authorization
- Basic reporting on stage timing and conversion
Phase 2
Connect
8–12 weeks
- EMR, document/AI, and communications integrations
- Automation for routing, reminders, and gate progression
- Exception handling for denials, missing records, and rework
- Expanded reporting and source attribution
Phase 3
Scale
Rollout onward
- Center-by-center rollout with enablement
- Governance for data, access, and change management
- Ongoing optimization against agreed targets
All timing illustrative; validate after technical discovery.
Decision lens
Four paths, judged on fit—not on a winner.
These are not mutually exclusive. The most durable sequence is often to stabilize intake while the clinical platform decision proceeds on its own merits and timeline.
Repair current Salesforce / TotalABA
- Best when
- The clinical model is fundamentally right and the constraint is configuration, reporting, and accumulated debt rather than the platform itself.
- Watch for
- A decade of customization makes change slow and estimates unreliable; intake improvements compete with clinical priorities in the same backlog.
- Relationship to intake
- Intake stays coupled to the clinical system, so front-door improvements move at clinical-release speed.
Intake point solution
- Best when
- The need is narrowly defined lead handling and speed to first contact, with limited downstream orchestration.
- Watch for
- Coverage often stops before authorization, waitlist, and multi-service evaluation; another system to integrate and govern.
- Relationship to intake
- Solves capture well, but may not carry a referral all the way to therapy start.
HubSpot intake layer
- Best when
- Intake spans marketing, operations, and clinical handoffs, and the EMR decision is still in motion.
- Watch for
- Requires explicit PHI boundaries, disciplined system-of-record definition, and real integration work with the selected EMR.
- Relationship to intake
- Purpose-built for orchestration and communication; complements a new EMR rather than forcing a premature platform choice.
Wholesale EMR replacement
- Best when
- Clinical documentation, billing, and compliance needs have outgrown the current platform and warrant a full transition.
- Watch for
- Long timeline, high change load, and—among the finalists discussed—intake capability that is incomplete on its own.
- Relationship to intake
- Necessary for clinical modernization, but unlikely to fully resolve the intake seam without a coordination layer.
Next
Discovery questions to answer next.
These are the answers that turn this vision into a scoped, priceable program ahead of the late-August board discussion.
Next conversation
Let’s make the next conversation concrete.
We’ll map one real Hopebridge referral from first signal to therapy start, show where HubSpot fits, and leave with a clear integration and scope hypothesis.