—The management of patient referrals is an interesting issue when it comes to predicting future patient demand to increase hospital productivity. In general, a patient is referred from the general practitioner to hospital care. A patient referral contains information that indicates the need for hospital care and this information is differently structured for different medical needs. In practice, these needs can be viewed as the forthcoming patient demand at the hospital, analogous to a volume of orders. Today, the structure of the referrals is very much up to the general practitioner who is referring the patient. This implies that the data provided to the hospital can vary extensively between cases. We suggest that, by enforcing a certain structure on the referral data, it may be possible to make early predictions about the patient demand. Such predictions could then be used as a basis for managing resources more efficiently to increase hospital productivity. This paper investigates ...