FAQ

Straight answers to the questions practice managers and IT teams ask most often.

What happens before a practice goes live?

A new practice confirms its work email, accepts the agreement and opens an empty referral list. New referrals start off. For Microsoft 365, the practice chooses the inbox and gets Microsoft admin approval. Refera checks that it can read only the chosen inbox. New referrals start only when every check passes. The first 50 referrals are free, with no card, no time limit and no automatic charge. More: Signing up.

Can Refera match our practice branding?

Yes. During setup, you can optionally enter the practice’s public website and ask Refera to suggest a logo and accessible colours from its public homepage. Nothing is applied until you choose Use this brand. If the suggestion is not right, choose the colours manually or keep the Refera default. Refera stores the confirmed brand, not a copy of the website, and embeds an approved raster logo rather than loading it from the practice’s site. Owners and Admins can change the shared brand later; Staff can view it but cannot change it. More: Practice branding.

How do staff sign in?

Refera has no passwords. A user-verified passkey is the recommended, phishing-resistant route. Staff without passkey support can confirm a single-use email link and enter the current code from their enrolled authenticator app. Neither email nor TOTP works alone. Recovery codes allow restricted factor replacement and never open referral data. More: Signing in.

Does Refera write into my EMR?

No. Refera never writes into your EMR. Staff get a ready-to-enter card for each referral, with a verbatim source excerpt and attachment details. The original message and attachment remain in the practice’s connected inbox. Staff make the appointment in the system they already use, then record the outcome in Refera. More: Alongside your EMR.

Does Refera contact my patients?

Refera never auto-sends or independently contacts a patient, and there is no patient account or patient-facing Refera portal. Cancellation Fill can prepare generic appointment copy for an eligible record. Named practice staff approve and copy it, use the practice’s normal SMS, email or calling system, then separately record offered, accepted and booked. Approval is not sending, and acceptance is not booking. More: Cancellation Fill and Cancellation Fill safety and consent.

How does Refera fill a last-minute cancellation?

Cancellation Fill shows two separate lists for a cancelled slot. Ready to book contains unbooked referrals only after named staff confirm scheduling readiness outside Refera; it stays in original referral arrival order. Earlier appointment contains already-booked patients with a specific opt-in and stated availability; it is ordered by available-from date, then referral arrival. Refera prepares one generic draft at a time. Staff approve and copy, send through the practice’s normal channel, attest the offer and separately mark the actual booking filled. Nothing is sent automatically. Value estimates count filled bookings only, not drafts, offers or acceptances.

Real-patient use is default-off until fresh privacy, legal and practice-operational sign-off for this workflow is recorded. More: Run Cancellation Fill.

Is Refera a medical device?

No. Refera tracks referral admin only. It does not triage patients, rank urgency, suggest a diagnosis or make clinical decisions. Any urgency shown is copied from the referral and linked to its source. More: No clinical triage.

What happens if Refera misreads a fax?

The connected console shows the verbatim source excerpt and attachment metadata beside the extracted fields. Anything unparseable stays in the queue marked needs review; it is never silently dropped or guessed at. Real referrals stay off until original-document retention, retrieval and export have been proven for the enabled path. Nothing sends without a person approving it. More: What Refera does not do.

Can I leave, and what do I take with me?

The practice can download its settings, referral records and available history as JSON, free of charge. Object-Locked source storage is deployed in AWS Sydney. Complete source retention, authenticated retrieval, restore and export remain unavailable until the lifecycle is proven end to end. Account closure is an authenticated assisted request that revokes access and preserves records. Deletion or de-identification is not deployed and remains unavailable. Refera does not claim a separate per-practice key or instant cryptographic erasure. More: Exports and leaving.

Where is my data hosted?

The Refera app, API and practice record store are deployed in AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2).

Where a practice’s agreement and activation enable AI-assisted administrative extraction, Refera uses Amazon Bedrock to process recovered referral text, never images. Requests enter through the Sydney runtime endpoint and use Australian inference profiles (au.*), with inference in Sydney and Melbourne.

Rules run first, and the model is used only below the extraction confidence threshold. Haiku 4.5 is the default, with at most one Sonnet 4.6 attempt when Haiku’s result is invalid or a core field (patient name, date of birth, referrer or reason) is unresolved. Extraction returns administrative fields only. A model value is kept only if it appears in the letter. The Medicare number keeps its checksum validation. The model never sets urgency or category: any urgency wording is the referrer’s own, copied verbatim by fixed rules, and category comes only from a labelled field. Refera performs no clinical triage.

For that enabled path, referral text is processed over a private network path, with no internet route for the extraction function. Bedrock data retention is set to “none” in both Australian regions, invocation logging is off, and customer content is not used for training.

The public documentation assistant handles product and support information only and is not a referral-processing path. More: Data residency.

What does my IT actually have to do?

Choose the Microsoft 365 inbox reception already checks. It may be shared or individual and does not need to be called referrals@. Then use a Microsoft 365 admin who can approve apps and manage Exchange for the practice. If that is not you, choose Another administrator will approve and copy the 30-minute link for IT. Finish later saves the inbox without asking Microsoft for access.

Refera stores no staff password and keeps no ongoing admin access. It checks that it can read the chosen inbox and that its access stops there. No second mailbox is needed. New referrals stay off until every check passes. Existing mail is not imported. The full detail is on What your IT needs to grant.

Does the referring GP have to change anything?

No change is required when a referrer already sends to the connected email or fax-to-email address. The practice keeps that familiar route; Refera organises the work after the message arrives. HealthLink and Medical-Objects are not production connectors in this release and are described separately. No two-sided referral network is required. More: How Refera compares.

Do you support Medical-Objects?

Not yet, and we say so plainly: Medical-Objects is the named next secure messaging rail after HealthLink, and it is not yet connected. The referring GP’s software picks the rail, and Medical-Objects has real national scale with a Queensland-heavy footprint, so it is next in the build order. Tell us which rails your referrers send on at [email protected] - measured referrer coverage decides the order. More: Medical-Objects.

How long does going live take?

Timing depends on the first connection. Microsoft 365 setup can start as soon as the referral inbox and a Microsoft admin who can approve apps and manage Exchange are ready. Refera then checks that it can read the chosen inbox and that its access stops there. Microsoft permission propagation can take time, but the practice does not need to keep the page open. HealthLink is not connected and remains partner-gated while its written partner assessment, applicable technical profile and conformance process, safe testing, and a reviewed reversible cutover remain open. More: Preparing to go live.

How is urgency shown, if Refera does not rank referrals?

The queue stays in strict arrival order and is never re-sorted. Urgency appears only as the referrer’s own words, quoted and attributed - for example: referrer wrote “please see within two weeks”. Attachments are noted, never interpreted. More: Verbatim urgency.

How do Inbox refresh and device notifications work?

The connected Inbox shows the time of its last successful check and a personal new arrivals counter for records seen by that browser since Refera opened. Optional Web Push is an explicit per-device opt-in from Settings. Notifications are generic and count-only, with no patient, referrer, referral or clinical detail. Desktop browsers can opt in directly; on iPhone and iPad, Refera must first be installed as a Home Screen web app. More: Inbox updates and device notifications.

Which phone number should I use?

The practice sales and support line uses an AI assistant. Use the number shown in the footer below or on the Refera contact page. It is for product, setup and pricing questions, never patients or referral content. The displayed line changes only after its provider, agent assignment and inbound-call release checks pass together.

Open the current practice contact options. More: Support.

What does it cost?

Your first 50 referrals are free - the full product, no card, a one-time allowance for the practice (not a time trial and not a monthly reset). After that, Practice is A$139 a month, or Enterprise A$417 - ex GST, flat fees that are never a percentage of billings. One price covers your whole practice, every user included, with no per-seat charges. There is no setup charge and no payment method is taken at sign-up. An Owner or Admin can choose Start your subscription in Settings → Billing to open hosted Stripe Checkout. You can pay by card or Australian bank debit, with GST shown separately. Refera stores no card details. Request an invoice remains available for accounts teams. Submitting an invoice request does not start a subscription or charge. Neither account setup nor using the first 50 free referrals starts an automatic charge. An Owner or Admin can download the practice’s Refera records at no export charge. Subscription cancellation and account closure follow the accepted terms and authenticated process. More: Pricing.

Can we pay by invoice?

Yes. An Owner or Admin can select a plan and billing cycle, enter the billing email and add an optional purchase-order or accounts reference. The request is recorded with a durable reference so it can be retried or cancelled while it is still requested or under review. Submitting it does not charge the practice, create a Stripe invoice, start a subscription or turn paid service on. The Refera team separately confirms the invoice and paid activation. Do not put patient, referral or payment-card details in the reference field. More: Manage your subscription.

What is Refera Intelligence, and does it cost extra?

Refera Intelligence is not currently available or sellable. Its design is limited to administrative questions over a practice’s own referrals stored in Refera, with cited answers. It does not triage patients. Enabling administrative extraction does not enable that add-on. Any future Intelligence service requires its own agreement, activation and Australian processing, privacy and feature-readiness checks. Refera will publish availability and pricing only after those checks pass. More: Refera Intelligence.

Can Refera send from our own Microsoft 365 mailbox?

Optionally, and only through a separate tier that the Owner turns on. The current implementation is limited to the fixed patient-booking email: a named authorised staff member reviews the exact recipient and message, then explicitly approves one send from the practice’s nominated mailbox. Read-only inbox access does not grant sending, attachments are disabled, and referrer replies remain copy-ready rather than automatically sent. Microsoft 202 Accepted is recorded as accepted for processing, not delivered. Refera never retries an unknown outcome automatically. More: Microsoft 365 mailbox.