More and more general practices are using digital triage. This can help deal with staff shortages and increasing workloads. Digital triage especially helps to get the right care at the right place, says Wieger Vos, director of Uw Zorg Online. The company therefore sees the demand for digital triage tools growing enormously.
Digital access to general practice has become increasingly important in recent years. And so has the need for proper triage or consultation preparation.
Wieger Vos: "By asking the patient more questions, you can ensure that the right care ends up in the right place. Sometimes no appointment is needed at all. Steering care is therefore at the heart of customer questions. How do I get care to the people who really need it? And how do I reduce phone pressure in practice?"
For example, Your Care Online collaborates with the digital self-triage tool "Do I need to see a doctor? That tool gives patients a low-threshold alternative to calling the practice. If the tool is used through the Your Care Online platform, the digital triage comes directly into the file.
Self-care advice
"And by answering some digital questions, you might find out, for example, that the patient doesn't need to come to the practice or doesn't need to come urgently," Vos continues. "Or maybe he can get away with self-care advice."
"A phone call is always unplanned. If someone has a spot on the skin, for example, it might be helpful to take a picture and mail it to the GP. As a GP, you can then look at it and give advice on it. That saves a phone call, as well as a physical appointment. And a questionnaire prior to the consultation can help both patient and doctor better prepare for the physical appointment."
By asking better questions of the patient, you as a general practice can ensure that the right care ends up in the right place. Sometimes no appointment is needed at all and the care question can be answered in an e-consult."
Workload and self-care
Digital triage thus helps reduce GP workload, Vos argues. "By having patients fill out a consultation-preparatory questionnaire and immediately schedule an appointment, you avoid calling the practice. In the Digidok SmartConsult module, we have around 6,000 consultation-preparation questions per month. Among the care paths that lend themselves to this, over 28 percent deflect from a physical appointment to an e-consult. Out of the total number of consultations, that's almost 10 percent."
With the module, patients prepare their own consultations. To do so, they go through triage and anamnesis questions for the most common conditions. Those questions are designed per complaint area through decision trees and algorithms. "An e-consult is of course much easier for a patient. They can answer the questions in their own time," Vos says. "If you can keep someone out of care with well-validated self-care advice, that's nice for everyone. And if someone has to come in anyway, you have a better prepared consultation."
Encouraging self-care from practice
How can you encourage this self-care more from within your practice? And how do you get people on the right care track with it? Quin helps with that. That 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 influx of patients."
The promise of digital triage
About 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 just at the beginning," Vos states. "There is a lot of interest from practices because that digital practice is becoming more and more important. But most of the primary care physicians we talk to are still kind of orienting themselves on how to use digital services."
Artificial intelligence
How will digital triage continue to evolve? Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play an increasing role, Vos expects. "Think, for example, 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 those tools based on AI will increasingly enable the GP to get the patient to the right place."
But we are not there yet. "In healthcare, you can't make mistakes. And just trusting what a computer tells you, without knowing exactly how that computer arrived at that answer, is difficult (yet)."
Adoption as a key word
Regardless, the digital front door is now increasingly commonplace for general practices, Vos says. "More and more patients know how to find it. That can make a huge contribution to reducing that influx of physical patients. The power now of digital triage is not so much in coming up with new tools, but in helping GP practices to properly deploy existing tools and ensure a good digital influx. Adoption is the key word."