Clinic operations where every external lab order comes back to the right person — and the follow-up actually gets booked

Mi Retail is an operations center for clinics, outpatient centers and healthcare networks. It manages the administrative work that has to happen around patient care: sending an order to an external lab, routing a result to the provider who ordered it, verifying coverage, booking a follow-up visit or resolving a billing exception. Each of those situations becomes an Operational Work Item with an owner, a state, a due date and evidence. The front desk sees what it has to book, care coordination sees every open order, providers see what is waiting for their review and the clinic director sees only what is stuck. Mi Retail does not provide clinical functionality; care decisions stay with your clinicians and your EHR.

No. Your electronic health record stays the system of record for the medical chart, orders and clinical notes, and your practice management system keeps scheduling and claims. Mi Retail never duplicates them. It covers what those systems leave to phone calls and memory: the order that has to reach an outside lab, the result that must be routed to someone, the follow-up visit that must be booked, the coverage question that needs an answer before a procedure. Each work item can point to the original record, so staff go to the EHR for clinical detail and to Mi Retail to know who has to act next and by when.

When a provider signs an order in the EHR, care coordination opens a work item that holds the administrative case. Patient services verifies coverage and attaches the authorization reference. Mi Retail then sends a derived work item to the laboratory’s own organization, where their intake team registers the order, records the sample collection and, once the lab has processed it in its own system, attaches the signed result report as evidence. The clinic sees each state change without calling the lab. When the report arrives, the ordering provider reviews it in the EHR and marks the review, patient services books the follow-up visit, and the original order closes with the full trail.

Yes. Work between organizations moves as derived work items, so both the clinic and its partner lab, imaging center or specialist practice need their own organization on Mi Retail. The clinic picks the partner from the directory and sends the request; the partner receives it in its own intake queue and assigns it inside its teams. Each side keeps its privacy: the clinic follows the state, the due time and the result, but not the lab’s internal queues, staff or conversations, and the lab sees only what the clinic chose to send. When the partner completes its work item, the clinic is notified and its own work item can move on.

Mi Retail is designed for administrative work, not for the medical record. A work item needs an owner, a state, a due date and the minimum context to act — an order reference, a patient identifier, a document the partner must return. Clinical notes, interpretations and care decisions stay in your EHR, and the work item can simply link to it. You decide what each workspace contains and who can see it: restricted workspaces keep sensitive intake or billing queues visible only to the people who work them. The practical rule for most clinics is simple: the chart lives in the EHR, and Mi Retail carries the work that the chart generates.

Each role gets its own surface over the same operation. Front desk and scheduling staff start from Today and My Work, with the check-ins, coverage checks and visits they have to book. Care coordinators use Team Operations to see every open order, what is waiting on a partner and what is at risk of missing its time. Providers see only the work items that need them, such as a result to review. The clinic director uses Operational Portfolio to compare areas or sites, and Executive Operations for exceptions that need a decision. Control & Assurance lets a quality or internal audit team review closed cases without asking anyone for screenshots.

Yes, and referrals follow the same pattern as external lab orders. The clinic opens a referral work item, attaches the documents the specialist needs and sends a derived work item to the specialist practice, imaging center or hospital, provided it also has its own organization on Mi Retail. The receiving team accepts it, books the appointment on its side and returns the visit summary or report as evidence. Meanwhile, the referring clinic can see whether the referral is waiting, scheduled or completed, and a coordinator can step in when a referral sits too long. The referral stops being a letter that disappears and becomes work both sides can follow.

Coverage checks, prior authorizations and denied claims are administrative work that usually lives in phone queues and spreadsheets. In Mi Retail, each one becomes a work item assigned to patient services or billing, linked to the visit or order it affects, with a due date that reflects when the answer is needed. If an authorization is missing, the work item can be blocked with that reason, so the coordinator and the provider know exactly why a procedure cannot be booked yet. When the answer arrives, the reference is attached as evidence. The claim itself is still submitted and tracked in your billing or practice management system.

Every work item keeps who acted, when, in which state and with which attachments. For an external lab order, that means the signed order form, the coverage reference, the lab’s collection record, the result report it attached, the moment the provider marked the review and the confirmation of the follow-up visit. When a patient asks why a result took so long, or an internal review wants to know how orders are handled, the clinic can show the sequence instead of rebuilding it from inboxes and phone logs. The evidence is captured while the work happens, which is what makes it reliable when someone looks at it months later.

Yes, it is the same product at both ends. In a small practice where three or four people do everything, the experience reduces to one Today view: orders waiting on a lab, results to route, visits to book, without empty teams or artificial hierarchies. In a network with several sites and hundreds of staff, the same work items are distributed across front desks, care coordination, billing, providers and regional management, each with its own surface, and exceptions escalate to the level that can decide. Partner labs and imaging centers connect the same way in both cases. What changes is how responsibilities are divided, not the way the work is represented.

The Healthcare edition of StoneOS brings apps for the domain work of a clinic — Patients, Appointments, Providers, Orders, Billing, Insurance and a Patient Portal, among others — on top of the Business Core apps every team uses: Chat, Docs, Drive, Calendar, People, Notes, Sheets, Slides and To-do. Those apps keep the depth of each domain. Mi Retail is where the work they generate meets the people who must move it: an appointment that needs rebooking, an insurance question or an order waiting on a partner lands as a work item in the right queue. If you prefer to keep your current EHR and practice management system, they stay the record.

Start with one administrative loop that keeps slipping — external lab orders, referrals or follow-up visits that never get booked — instead of modeling the whole clinic. Create the workspace for that loop, invite the coordinators, front desk staff and providers involved, and let the first orders arrive as work items with an owner and a due date. Invite your most frequent partner lab to open its own organization so derived work items can reach it. Within a couple of weeks you will see where orders wait and who carries the load. Then add the next loop. Mi Retail is free to start, so a single site can try it before a whole network does.