My nurses seem to spend an extraordinary amount of time on the phone getting subspecialist referrals. Some days hours are spent getting these needed referral numbers. My office personnel is the biggest part of my overhead so it is important to me that they work as efficiently as possible in order to keep health care costs down. One day I thought my husband had piped in Muzak to the office because of continuous elevator music in the office all morning. It was at lunch that I found out that all this time it was the speaker phone on hold to an insurance company. I somehow had missed the timed interruptions to the music that stated "your call is important to us, please hold, calls will be answered in the order that they are received....." How do you handle these referral calls- I don't think that I refer that much but I sometimes need these wise subspecialist's help. Thanks. Kim Burlingham, MD