More and more GP practices are using digital triage. This can help to deal with staff shortages and increasing workloads. Digital triage mainly helps to get the right care in the right place, says Wieger Vos, manager of Uw Zorg OnlineThe company is therefore seeing enormous growth in demand for digital triage tools.
Digital access to the GP practice has become increasingly important in recent years. And so has the need for good triage or good consultation preparation.
Wieger Vos: “By asking more questions to the patient, you can ensure that the right care ends up in the right place as a GP practice. Sometimes an appointment is not even necessary. Care management is therefore the core of customer questions. How do I get the care to the people who really need it? And how do I reduce the telephone pressure in the practice?”
Uw Zorg Online works together with the digital self-triage tool 'Should I go to the doctor?' This tool gives patients an accessible alternative to calling the practice. If the tool is used via the Uw Zorg Online platform is used, the digital triage is entered directly into the file.
Self-care advice
“And by answering a number of digital questions, you can find out, for example, that the patient does not need to come to the practice or does not need to come urgently,” Vos continues. “Or perhaps he can get by with self-care advice.”
“A phone call is always unplanned. If someone has a spot on their skin, it can be useful to take a photo and email it to the GP. As a GP, you can then look at it and give advice about it. That saves a phone call, but also a physical appointment. And a questionnaire prior to the consultation can help both the patient and the doctor to better prepare for the physical appointment.”
By asking more questions to the patient, you can ensure that the right care ends up in the right place as a GP practice. Sometimes an appointment is not necessary at all and the care question can be answered in an e-consultation.”
Work pressure and self-care
Digital triage helps to reduce the workload of the GP, says Vos. “By having patients fill out a consultation-preparatory questionnaire and immediately schedule an appointment, you prevent the practice from being called. In the Digidok SmartConsult module, we have around 6.000 consultation-preparatory questions per month. In the care pathways that lend themselves to this, more than 28 percent deviate from a physical appointment to an e-consultation. Of the total number of consultations, that is almost 10 percent.”
With the module, patients prepare their own consultation. To do this, they go through triage and anamnesis questions for the most common conditions. These questions are designed per complaint area using decision trees and algorithms. “An e-consultation is of course much easier for a patient. They can answer the questions in their own time,” says Vos. “If you can keep someone out of care with well-validated self-care advice, that is pleasant for everyone. And if someone does have to come, you have a better prepared consultation.”
Stimulating self-care through practice
How can you stimulate this self-care more from your practice? And how do you get people on the right care track with it? Quin helps with that. This system gives patients access to a smart symptom checker. This provides an overview of the most likely causes of a complaint. The checker also provides the patient with self-care and contact advice and refers them to the chat or to scheduling a consultation. Vos: “This reassures patients with non-urgent complaints and creates a triaged, digital inflow of patients.”
The promise of digital triage
Approximately 40 percent of general practitioners in the Netherlands currently use Uw Zorg Online. Some of them have already taken the step to digital triage. “We are actually only at the beginning,” says Vos. “There is a lot of interest from practices because digital practice management is becoming increasingly important. But most GPs we speak to are still orienting themselves on how they can use digital services.”
Artificial intelligence
How will digital triage develop further? Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly important role, Vos expects. “For example, think of preparing an answer to an e-consultation in advance. So that the GP no longer has to type it himself, but can send it immediately. Specifically for digital triage, I expect that these tools based on AI will increasingly enable the GP to get the patient to the right place.”
But we're not there yet. "You can't make mistakes in healthcare. And just trusting what a computer tells you, without knowing exactly how that computer arrived at that answer, is (still) difficult."
Adoption as a key word
In any case, the digital front door is now increasingly a daily practice for GP practices, says Vos. “More and more patients know where to find it. That can make a huge contribution to reducing the influx of physical patients. The power of digital triage now lies not so much in devising new tools, but in helping GP practices to use existing tools well and to ensure a good digital influx. Adoption is the key word.”