Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with referrals

How to request/get a referral to another doctor?

tristeza — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:26:28 -0800

How does getting a medical referral/requesting a medical referral REALLY work and how do you ask for one effectively? My mom recently got a preliminary cancer diagnosis (from a CT scan for an unrelated injury) at a medical center in Maine where she's staying for the summer. She was told that a likely first step is to remove the kidney with the mass, sooner rather than later. She's only been seen by her GP at this point.

My family wants her to be seen in Boston at a comprehensive cancer center like Dana Farber right away, before the ball really gets going in Maine. Oh, and she's a senior with MediCare.

She has a urology appt tomorrow morning as her first follow-up since the "we found a mass" news, and I want her to get a referral to Dana Farber, but I realize I'm not 100% sure how this works.

Can she simply say to the urologist, "please refer me to DF" without having a name of a specific doc? If she does, will the doc just go ahead and call DF and find someone to see my mom?

Or does the doc just say "OK" and call DF to tell them we're going to call them to make all arrangements??

Thanks for any help, we're all completely clueless about this process and I want her to have a good "script" when she goes in tomorrow.

Drama-free networking: how?

justonegirl — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:28:52 -0800

Looking for advice and strategies from experienced business networkers (or schmoozers, for lack of a better word.) My husband and I run a pretty successful company in an industry based largely on interpersonal relationships and referrals. Our success thus far has been built on things like providing great service, earning various honors, being a good source of industry-related information for media contacts, etc. (Basically, for doing good work as opposed to just being a good schmoozer.)

Our next frontier is for my husband, who’s the face of our company, to do more networking, so that more business can be referred to us. We’re members of several industry groups, so there are a lot of opportunities for him to get involved with other people. The challenge is that he’s trying to break into a fairly tight-knit group of people who spend a lot of time doing this whole networking thing, in an industry that tends to breed a lot of gossip and pettiness. On the whole, people tend to be way more interested in what others are doing than in most industries, I’d guess.

For what it’s worth, our company has a pretty impeccable reputation and we have absolutely no reason not to be completely proud of our business practices and ethics. However, there are a lot of “haters” out there, specifically competitors whom we (once upon a time) worked with or for, who’ve had ample time to put down our company and our accomplishments to whoever would listen. There also seems to be some general resentment among direct competitors that our company, which is only a few years old, is doing really well. This results in some pretty creative story-spinning on their part, and it would seem that many people are all too happy to listen.

I’m hoping to get some suggestions on ways to effectively and professionally network with other businesses, while not being bogged down by competitors’ negativity toward us. We’d like to be able to quickly shut down these people’s efforts to slam us (as opposed to just pretending it isn’t happening) but without getting involved in a lot of petty drama.

In case it affects your response, confidence and ability to “work a room” isn’t really the issue; we’re more concerned with how to get a fresh start in a networking group that may have already been influenced by the words and actions of our competitors. Also, we definitely do want to network and feel it’s important, so responses that networking isn’t a good business tool probably won’t be that helpful – it really is a huge part of the industry we’re in. Thanks so much!

How do I deal with internal redirects in Google Analytics?

Hartster — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:13:38 -0800

How do I deal with internal redirects in Google Analytics? Our site uses Browserhawk to serve up different content for different audiences. This means whenever a visitor comes to our
site, on the first page they land on, however they get there, they're redirected from page.asp to page.asp?bhcp=1 at the top of the page, and well before the Google Analytics code is reached.

This currently means that Google Analytics does not have a referrer for all new visitors, instead treating them as having come direct.

Now, from Browserhawk I can get that initial referrer on page.asp?bhcp=1, but how do I pass that to Google? Is there a way of overwriting the value that Google uses? Or can I set it up as a custom report and just ignore the default referral report?

DC Dentist Recommendations?

whitneykitty — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:02:07 -0800

I searched the archives and came up with two threads DC-wise, one recommending doctors in general and another with recommendations for cosmetic dentistry. The dentist I'm looking for is metro accessible (preferably NW DC) and has reasonable rates (completely out of pocket) for a standard cleaning and plaque removal/scaling. Thanks!

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop.

Milkman Dan — Wed, 16 May 2007 10:53:16 -0800

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop. For a few months now, my referral log has been flooded by mildly amusing, but mostly annoying, porn site URLs. These sites are throwing off my data entirely, filling the log with anywhere from 1 to 200 hits each. Almost all of them are over-the-top porn URLs. I want it to stop.

I know what the phenomenon is, and I’ve read all the other AskMe threads about it. I’m not interested in diagnostics, I want to know the cure. I run WordPress, and I’m currently running the Bad Behaviour plug-in, and have been for two months, but the problem has remained. Yes, I run Google Analytics as an alternative, but I’d like to solve the problem within this stats program (Webalizer Version 2.01), too.

Clear, step-by-step instructions would be most helpful, but any suggestions would be much appreciated. Oh, and you can click here to view my referral log from May.

How to highlight a referral on a job cover letter?

Manhasset — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 09:14:08 -0800

I am applying for a job at a place where I have a professional contact who has okay'd me to use him as a reference. However, since references are at the end of a resume, I want to ensure that this fact is highlighted to the HR department (the person is very high up in the company). ... I thought it would be a good idea to highlight his referral on my cover letter but I have no idea how to do it without lying. Ie, I thought that I could mention that the man told me about the job, but he didn't. I thought I'd ask him if it was okay to say this, but don't want to apply to a job by asking a higher up there if he'll cover my lie. I also don't want to be a pest as him offering to a reference is extremely generous considering I haven't seen him in almost a decade.

I have applied to this company multiple times in the past (without the reference) and have never gotten a phone call. I don't want them to say, "Oh, him again!" and immediately dump the resume.

What should I do? Any suggestions for how to word a letter to highlight his referral?

Adult Referrer Sites

thebwit — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:14:00 -0800

For some reason lately the traffic to my site has increased by a lot (about 500+ visitors a day) which nice and all. I have a great script that reads the log files and figures out the stats and I wrote a custom script to track referalls. One thing I noticed though is a large portion of the traffic I receive comes from adult sites that do not link to me. So how is it that on any given day pornwizzard.com can send me 30-40 visitors? Do I really have that many people who read my site after going to pornwizzard (or any other number of adult sites) or are these sites doing something funky trying to just get traffic to their site if I was to randomly put up a last 10 referrals?

Any idea of how gmail beta invites are doled out?

Sinner — Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:32:38 -0800

I mentioned this in interrobang's big "Who wants a gmail account" thread, but got no response. Does anyone have any thoughts on, or knowledge of, the criteria google is using to select which users receive referrals? After around a week of pretty heavy use I received three (which I gave to family) significantly before friends who had had accounts for much longer, but who had used theirs' less.