Cliniko and Salesforce: See Which Referral Channels Fund Your OT Network

When referrals come in through Salesforce but treatment happens in Cliniko, leadership cannot see which channels actually fund the business. The intake coordinator sees referrals. The schedulers see appointments. Nobody sees the link between them, so nobody can answer the question that decides next year’s partnership investments: which referral channels actually produce completed care plans.

Take an illustrative example: Meridian Occupational Therapy Group, a hypothetical regional provider with 6 clinics, 28 OTs, and a referral base that mixes insurers, GPs, school districts, and self-referrals. The intake team works in Salesforce. Scheduling and clinical outcomes live in Cliniko. Leadership cannot tell which referral channels convert to completed first assessments, let alone completed care plans. Channel investment decisions get made on gut feel.

Where the picture breaks

A typical intake flow at a 6-clinic network looks like this: a referral arrives by fax, portal, or phone; the intake coordinator creates a Salesforce record with the referral source noted; the referral is assigned to a clinic; the patient is set up in Cliniko at that clinic; appointments are scheduled in Cliniko; treatment happens in Cliniko. The Salesforce record and the Cliniko patient are two separate records with no live connection. Whether the referral ever turned into a completed first assessment, let alone a completed care plan, is something you can only reconstruct by hand from a Cliniko export.

Why the manual approach leaves you guessing

Pushing referrals one direction into Cliniko and pulling a quarterly export back gives you attribution that is stale and incomplete. By the time the export is reconciled, the moment to retrain the intake team or adjust a referral partnership has passed. The bigger problem is that the referral source rarely survives the trip. It sits on the Salesforce record but does not reliably make it onto the Cliniko patient as something you can report on. So even a manual export cannot answer “completed care plans by referral channel.”

How closed-loop referral tracking works

When CRMConnect connects Cliniko to Salesforce, the Salesforce record created at intake stays connected to the patient and gets enriched with live Cliniko activity all the way through their journey. Appointments flow into Salesforce with their status (booked, arrived, no-show, cancelled). Care information (referral source, referring practitioner, milestones, session limits) flows in too. Now your Salesforce reports can group by referral channel and count what actually matters: arrived first assessments and completed care plans.

Here is what you can put in place:

One connected record per patient. The Salesforce record from intake and the Cliniko patient stay linked. A corrected phone number, an updated address, a merged duplicate, any of these on the Cliniko side flows back to Salesforce.

Live appointment activity in Salesforce. Every appointment appears in Salesforce with its patient, practitioner, clinic, type, and status, and status changes come through within minutes.

The channel attribution report. Group by referral source. For each channel: referrals received, patients with a booked appointment, patients with an arrived first assessment, patients with a completed care plan, and total billed. This is the report leadership has never had.

Cost-adjusted channel performance. If you track partnership or marketing spend per channel, the report can show cost per arrived first assessment and cost per completed care plan, not just cost per raw referral.

Routing without losing attribution. Every appointment carries its assigned clinic, so a new referral can be routed to the right one of your 6 clinics based on geography, specialty, or insurer, while the original referral source stays attached.

What you typically discover

A network matching Meridian’s profile usually finds, within the first quarter, that one or two referral channels they assumed were strong are actually middling on completed care plans (plenty of referrals, low conversion to an arrived assessment), while a smaller channel is quietly producing the highest-value patients. That is a partnership-investment conversation leadership simply could not have before. The intake coordinator stops rebuilding the report by hand. The regional director gets a single Salesforce dashboard with completed care plans, billed revenue, and cost per channel, refreshed in real time.

Routing referrals without breaking the trail

One mistake to avoid: when you route a referral to a different clinic, do not create a brand-new record at the destination clinic. That throws away the original referral source. Instead, keep the original Salesforce record and simply change the assigned clinic. The patient is set up at the correct clinic in Cliniko without losing where the referral came from.

Why this matters for your network

A referral business that cannot see its conversion is a business spending partnership time and money on guesswork. When Cliniko treatment outcomes connect back to the referral source in Salesforce, “which channels actually fund us” becomes a number on a dashboard, not a debate. You invest in the partnerships that produce completed care plans, and you stop pouring effort into the ones that only produce referrals.

Want to see CRMConnect Cliniko to Salesforce in action? View the API App page.