Patient Triage

There is no app involved with Patient triage, so once you have your unique practice patient triage link, you can go ahead and share this with patients in any way you like. This article runs through how to get your link and share this with patients.

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Patient Triage is live with your patients as soon as you share your link. However, before sending your link, we recommend you follow our step-by-step guide to be as prepared as possible.

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Whilst we've made the form accessible for patients, practices who have tracked patient contact throughout rollout have found that phone calls are replaced with online access, but total requests haven't gone up. However, we recognise this as a valid concern.

We'd recommend that practices who are nervous about this go for an incremental roll-out with patients to build confidence in the new process.

For example, some practices put the link on their website but don't promote it largely at the beginning. It's less likely a lot of patients will use Patient Triage at once if it is not advertised. Then, once a practice has built confidence they then share Patient Triage with more patients through methods such as batch texts.

~10% of patients will choose to see online advice rather than submit a request, and patients requesting repeat prescriptions can be redirected to other online services if you already use them. We recommend saving custom templates with local advice to common questions.

From our research, we have found that AI can over-triage patients - i.e. send far more people to urgent services / A&E than what is needed or appropriate. At the moment, we don't think anything can replace a human's ability to triage, so we are focused on trying to make this process as quick and efficient as possible. For example, some requests can be dealt with by a quick text response with an information link, rather than the patient making an appointment.

We want to make sure that we gather sufficient information from the patient and the patient understands this information is relevant to the query to avoid patients giving up or calling the practice anyway if they don't understand or get an outcome they expect.

Yes, we are planning on integrating with the NHS app. We've started the process already, so we'll update as this progresses.

Patients are advised that Patient Triage is not for urgent queries, as requests might not be seen by the practice for a number of working days.

Patients are directed towards 111 or 999 services for more urgent requests, and there is a customisable option to switch on an 'out of hours' message, which directs patients to local out of hours services outside of 08.00 - 18.00h, weekends, and Bank holidays (this article explains how).

Before submitting a medical or admin request, patients must confirm they have no 'red flag' symptoms. If they do, they are advised to seek more urgent medical attention, and they cannot proceed to submit a requestUpon submission, patients are reminded that the practice may not see their requests for the defined amount of time, and advised to seek more urgent medical attention if they deteriorate