Patient-Facing Online Triage Tools and Clinician Decision-Making
Online triage tools help manage primary care demand, guiding patients to calls, scripts, GP visits or referrals.
Patient-facing online triage tools in primary care facilitate contact between the patient and their primary care service provider. The tools gather information about patients’ clinical needs to enable triage decisions on the appropriate next steps. A triage decision is usually focussed on how best to meet the identified patient healthcare needs. Patient’s needs might be resolved over a telephone consultation, by issuing a repeat prescription, requiring the patient to be seen by a healthcare professional (eg, a general practitioner (GP) or a nurse) or requiring escalation to secondary care.1 In short, triage is a prioritisation process that has long been proposed as a solution to management of the demand for primary care services.2–5
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