Lime Intake: Every Referral Watched, Read, and Answered
Automated referral intake for home health and hospice. One queue watches your referral portals, fax line, and email inbox. Every referral gets read, screened against your admission criteria, and answered in minutes. Accepted patients land in your EMR.
What Is Lime Intake?
Lime Intake is an automated referral intake system for home health and hospice. It monitors referral portals, fax, and email continuously, reads every referral packet, applies your admission criteria, and returns an accept or decline decision in minutes. Accepted patients are created in your EMR with the referral data populated. Referrals needing human judgment route to your intake team as exceptions. The only thing Lime Intake asks of your EMR is creating the accepted patient.
Monitor, Understand, Decide, Act
Four steps replacing the reading and rekeying your intake team does today.
One inbox watches every referral channel
Referral portals, the fax line, and the email address your referral sources use all land in a single queue. Lime Intake monitors the channels continuously, detects each new referral, pulls the packet and its data, and removes duplicates before anyone opens a page.
The intake agent reads the referral
Every packet gets read the same way: patient demographics, diagnoses, orders, insurance, and discharge detail extracted from a 20 to 60 page PDF or fax. No coordinator reads to find out what the referral says.
Your criteria make the decision
Service line, geography, payer and coverage, clinical fit, and your own admission rules. You configure the criteria. Lime Intake applies them to every referral identically, at any hour.
Accepted patients move
The referral source gets an answer, handoff begins, and the patient record is created in your EMR with the referral data already populated.
Declines get a reply and a reason
A decline goes back to the referral source promptly with the reason logged. Referral sources learn what you take, and your team gets a record of why each case was turned down.
Judgment calls go to a person
Anything the criteria do not settle routes to your intake team as an exception: call the patient, confirm the address, check clinician capacity. Your coordinators spend their day on the cases needing a human, not on the ones needing a reader.
Every Channel, One Queue
Referrals arrive in three places and rarely in one format. Referral portals carry the hospital and health system volume: WellSky CarePort hosts a large share of it, and individual health systems run their own portals alongside it. Fax still delivers new referral packets from physician offices and discharge planners. Email catches the referral sources sending directly to a coordinator.
Watching all three is a full-time job, and most agencies staff it as one. Coordinators keep portal tabs open, refresh them through the day, and check the fax queue between calls. A referral posting at 4:50pm on Friday waits until Monday. Lime Intake monitors every channel continuously, detects each new referral, pulls the packet and its structured data, removes duplicates arriving through two channels at once, and builds a single work queue. Everything in one place, with nothing missed because a tab went unrefreshed.
The Decision, Not the Data Entry
Document automation tools solved routing and rekeying years ago. The reading and the deciding stayed manual: someone opens a 20 to 60 page packet, works out what the patient needs, checks whether the agency covers the service line and the ZIP code, verifies the payer, decides whether the clinical picture fits, and answers the referral source.
Lime Intake automates that middle. The intake agent extracts patient details from the packet, checks the service line, checks geography, checks payer and coverage, checks clinical fit, and applies the rules your agency configured. The output is a decision with the supporting detail attached, ready for a coordinator to confirm or override.
Your Criteria, Applied the Same Way Every Time
No two agencies accept the same referral. Your criteria are yours to configure:
- Service line. What you provide, by discipline and program.
- Geography. The counties, ZIP codes, and drive times you serve, by branch.
- Payer and coverage. Contracts you hold, authorization requirements, and the payers you decline.
- Clinical fit. Acuity, equipment, and specialty protocols your team supports.
- Agency policy. Your own admission rules, escalation thresholds, and the cases always going to a human.
The same referral gets a different answer at a different agency, which is the point. Criteria live in one place instead of in the heads of your two most experienced coordinators.
Minimal EMR Integration, by Design
Intake automation asks very little of your EMR, and the difference matters. A documentation platform needs to read your charts, write back to them, and map every field in between, which turns into a months-long integration project. Lime Intake needs one action: create the accepted patient, with the referral data already populated.
Everything before that point happens outside the EMR entirely. Portal monitoring, packet reading, criteria screening, and the decision all run on the referral itself. Agencies on EMRs with limited integration options get automated intake anyway. Lime works alongside WellSky, HCHB, MatrixCare, Axxess, DSL, and Netsmart. See EMR integration for the full picture.
People Handle the Judgment Calls
Plenty of referrals need something no software should decide alone. The address on the packet is six months old. The patient needs a call before anyone commits to a start of care date. The clinical fit is right but nobody has capacity in that county this week.
Those referrals route to a human exception queue with the packet already read and the criteria already checked, so your coordinator picks up a case with the work done and a specific question remaining. Agencies wanting the people as well as the software add trained virtual intake coordinators to run the queue.
Response Time Is Referral Volume
Discharge planners and physician offices send to the agency answering first. When a referral waits in a portal until someone refreshes the tab, and the packet then takes 30 to 60 minutes of coordinator time, response is measured in hours or days and referrals leak to faster competitors.
Cutting packet to decision down to minutes raises admissions from the referral flow you already receive. No new referral relationships required. The front of the episode matters downstream too: under PDGM, the primary diagnosis captured at admission drives 30-day payment, and clean referral data feeds a cleaner start of care.
How It Compares
Referral document workflow platforms identify, route, and organize referral documents and hand a coordinator a tidier packet to read. Workflow automation tools handle the portal and payer clicking. Lime Intake automates the reading and the decision, then creates the patient. For a side-by-side breakdown, see Lime vs Forcura and the 2026 intake automation market guide.
Priced on Referral Volume
You pay for referrals processed, not per seat, license, or module. Cost scales with your referral flow, agencies start with a pilot before committing, and Lime price matches. Agencies already running Managed Scribe or Sentinel QA add intake to the same engagement, so the referral, the admission, the documentation, and the QA share one system of record.
FAQ
Lime Intake, Answered
What intake and operations leaders ask before automating referral intake.
Lime Intake is an automated referral intake system for home health and hospice. It monitors your referral portals, fax inbox, and email inbox continuously, reads each incoming referral packet, applies your admission criteria, and returns an accept or decline decision in minutes. Accepted patients are created in your EMR with the referral data populated, and the referral source gets an answer the same day. Cases needing human judgment route to your intake team as exceptions.
Most home health and hospice referrals arrive through referral portals rather than a direct feed. WellSky CarePort carries a large share of hospital and health-system referrals, and several health systems run their own portals alongside it. Lime Intake watches those portals along with your fax and email channels, detects new referrals as they post, and pulls the packet into one work queue. Your intake team stops refreshing portal tabs and starts working a single list.
Lime Intake needs one thing from your EMR: creating the accepted patient. There is no bidirectional mapping project, no data migration, and no interface build to schedule. Referral reading, criteria checking, and the accept or decline decision happen before your EMR is involved at all, which is why intake automation deploys in a fraction of the time a full EMR integration takes.
You do. Lime Intake applies the admission criteria your agency configures: service lines you cover, the geography you serve, payers and coverage you accept, clinical fit, and your own policy rules. Referrals meeting the criteria are accepted. Referrals falling outside them are declined with the reason logged. Anything ambiguous goes to your intake team rather than being decided by the system.
They route to a human exception queue. Some referrals need work no software should decide on its own: calling the patient, confirming the address is still current, or checking whether a clinician has capacity in that area this week. Lime Intake handles the reading and the routine decisions and hands your coordinators the cases actually needing them.
Minutes, on every channel, at every hour. Manual intake runs 30 to 60 minutes of coordinator time per referral and stops when the office closes. Referral sources route to the agency answering first, so response time converts directly into admission volume from referral flow you already receive.
On referral volume, not per seat or per license. Pricing scales with the referrals processed, agencies start with a pilot before committing, and Lime price matches. Agencies already running Lime documentation add intake without a separate platform fee.
Forcura is a referral document workflow platform: it identifies, routes, and organizes referral documents and syncs them with your EMR, and a coordinator still reads the packet and makes the decision. Lime Intake automates the reading and the decision itself, then creates the accepted patient. Agencies replacing manual intake labor tend to compare the two directly. See the full Lime vs Forcura comparison for a feature-by-feature breakdown.
Home health and hospice first, where referral volume is high and admission criteria are well defined. The same pattern applies anywhere referrals arrive by portal, fax, and email and someone has to read them, including behavioral health and other post-acute settings.
No. It changes what they spend the day on. Reading packets, checking eligibility, rekeying demographics, and refreshing portal tabs are the tasks the system absorbs. Calling patients, working referral source relationships, handling exceptions, and coordinating start of care are the tasks it hands back with more time attached. Agencies use intake automation to raise referral capacity without adding intake headcount.
Yes. Lime pairs intake automation with trained virtual intake coordinators who run the exception queue, work referral sources, and handle escalations. Agencies wanting the capacity without the hiring take both in one engagement.
Built by the team behind the scribe agencies trust with tens of thousands of patients monthly
See your last referral packet read and decided in minutes.
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