Painless referrals.

Referrals, far and away the most burdensome administrative problem created by managed care, can be automated using secure, private intranets. Hundreds of primary care physicians and their offices in the Northwest have begun using this approach to reduce the approval time to get patients to specialists and to cut administrative costs. Combined with intranet delivery of laboratory and imaging test results, the service allows primary care physicians to fulfill their responsibility as overseers of the health care delivery process.