Nurse Triage whitepaper

Introduction

Telephone triage nurses are incredibly important in healthcare. Healthcare workflows are unique in that patient safety must be considered at every step. Nurse triage is an integral component to this process. It supports consistent, safe, and high-quality care, while letting practitioners perform at their level of training.

Care Desk takes nurse clinical decision support to the next level, incorporating rich patient communication, best-in-class education content, and automated workflows based on the disposition and care advice, including appropriate scheduling.

Problems:

How Care Desk works:

Care Desk’s decision support is based on an extensive expert system that does far more than walk the nurse through clinical guidelines:

EHR and PM integrations pull in the patient medical history, office visit notes, patient alerts, and more.

Knowledge Base displays the patient and provider context, including geolocation, primary provider, and more

Software guides nurses through your next steps, such as:

A. Recommendations
B. Escalation, including 2nd level triage
(including provider-specific paging instructions)
C. Duty to terrify
D. Care advice
E. Scheduling
F. Encounter summaries
G. Secure follow-ups to patients or caregivers

Custom workflows are easily added

Health Information libraries linked for quick education and follow-up

Everything is documented, reportable, with summaries saved to the patient’s EHR chart

How does Help Desk help Nurse Triage?

Streamlined process - AHT reduces by 20-30%

Reduced human errors - physician complaints drop

Better patient experience - consistency and speed

Reduced nurse training - training time reduces by 50-70%

Streamlined communications - consistent and automated fax and email

Peace of mind that a nurse is not skipping steps

Streamlined communications - consistent and automated fax and email

Streamlined communications - consistent and automated fax and email

Expert System

Nurse Triage is just one implementation of Keona Health’s expert system.

Read more about Care Desk’s decision support here.

SCHMITT-THOMPSON CLINICAL CONTENT

Clients who don’t build their own content usually use the gold-standard Schmitt-Thompson Clinical Content (STCC). These nurse triage protocols are used in more than 25 million calls each year and by more than 90% of medical triage call centers in North America. These nursing telephone protocols come in four sets:

Read more about the STCC Content here.

CUSTOM WORKFLOWS

Nurse Triage is just one of the functions supported within the Care Desk Nursing Workspace.
Some of the most common:

It is difficult for a nurse to keep a full grasp of all of the above, and training and managing all of these is daunting. This is why Care Desk adds the same level of support and automation to any nurse workflow as to nurse triage. Read more about the Agent and Nurse Workspaces here.

AUTOMATING NEXT STEPS

Escalation

Whenever the decision support determines escalation may be needed, it guides the nurse through the appropriate escalation steps, whether that is creating a provider task, paging the patient’s current on-call physician, or contacting e911. Care Desk will prompt and guide the nurse through these steps, documenting the nurse’s decisions each step of the way.

Notification

Notifying the physician and their care team is just a click, whether this is through EHR messaging, a fax, or a secure message.

Escalation

Care Desk’s scheduling automation is so robust there is rarely an appointment that a nurse can’t easily schedule without forwarding the call.

HEALTH EDUCATION

Part of a nurse’s responsibility is to educate the patient about their health issue. Care Desk will incorporate your
Health Education source of choice.

Once your health library of choice is incorporated, nurses are not restricted to an all-or-nothing approach to health education. They are able to give the portions of the health education materials that are pertinent to the patient’s situation. Documenting this is as simple as highlighting the education content. The system automatically documents only this selection as given to the patient and not the rest of the materials.

PATIENT COMMUNICATION

The software has the ability to facilitate self-care and health education through the integration of Health Education libraries. It can also automatically send the care advice and health education that were given to a patient verbally as a
secure message:

For more information on Care Desk automated messaging, see Messaging Manager.