Introduction 👋

<aside> 💡 We understand that every practice is different and that your practice will have its own unique requirements for the best way of implementing Patient Triage. This section of the training pack covers the key decisions you’ll need to consider before rolling out Patient Triage, and how each consideration will impact your training materials and rollout plan.

For some considerations, we offer a recommendation based on our experience with other practices and based on how the product was designed. The role-based training guides will cover these as standard, but it should be easy to adapt. For others, we’ve seen very different approaches work well in different circumstances. In either case, there’s no single right answer and we’ll try and present the pros & cons as best as we can.

As a general rule, the fewer internal processes you change, the easier it will be to launch Patient Triage. Practices familiar with online access will probably already know what works best for them for most of these considerations. If you’re completely new to online access, feel free to reach out to us if you’d like extra support in working out what will work best for you.

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Pitfalls 🧗🏻

1. Set a Go-Live Date!

   While it can be helpful to get a small number of real requests to build confidence before going live, this halfway house has the pains of process change without seeing the benefits. Try and minimize the amount of time spent between getting the first requests in and fully embracing the change.

2. Don’t change the way that appointments are booked.

   Stick to your existing process for booking appointments

3. Give your triage team focus

   When someone is managing forms, they shouldn’t be taking on anything else (e.g. phones)

4. Deal with phone requests and triage requests in the same way.

   Don’t reserve separate appointment slots for phone calls

1. Temporarily disabling patient requests Out of Hours

You have the ability to temporarily block patients from submitting requests through Patient Triage. When disabled, patients see a page directing them to other services.

There are a couple of different options when limiting access to Patient Triage depending on your team’s preference:

• Switch on Out of Hours: Patients can still submit forms, but are first directed to other services
• Temporarily disable requests: a message explains that the service has been temporarily paused and explains to patients when they can get back in touch. Alternative options are listed to redirect patients.
• Temporarily disable medical requests only: medical requests are temporarily paused in the same way as above, but patients can still submit admin requests.

Option 1: Limit access outside of core hours RECOMMENDED We suggest that the form is temporarily disabled when first implementing Patient Triage. Once you are comfortable with the product and process, you may decide to turn the form on full-time.

Pros 👍🏼**:**

• No weekend backlog when arriving on Monday morning, which helps with staff morale.
• Consistent patient experience with phone lines where requests only come in during opening hours.

Cons 👎🏼**:**

• Disabling the form does not change patient demand, so may just displace it to Monday mornings.
• Patients don’t expect online forms to be disabled which can lead to confusion or frustration.
• It is less convenient for patients who may want to submit requests over weekends, after work etc.