Telephone based digital triage in urgent care
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The use of telephone based digital triage in urgent care provision and the associated patient service use and health outcomes: A routine data analysis study before and during the Covid-19 pandemic
IRAS ID
287529
Contact name
H Atherton
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Warwick
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Care services that provide out of hours care (care outside of general practice opening) often use digitally supported ‘telephone triage’. This telephone triage involves a health care service staff member using a software based ‘digital triage tool’, to help signpost the patient to the most appropriate service to receive health care; in part this helps health care services manage high demand. The digital triage tool is used by the staff member to input the patient’s symptoms in order to automatically generate signposting or care advice. This research aims to investigate how patients use these types of services and to better understand trends in the triage advice that is given to patients. It also aims to understand how telephone triage affects patients’ use of other health care services (such as A&E), and what happens to patients following telephone triage, in terms of their health outcomes, for example hospitalisations or in-hospital mortality. This study will analyse pseudonymised, pre-existing data from NHS urgent care providers, who already use digital triage in their care delivery. In addition, patient outcomes data from NHS Digital will be analysed. Previous studies have showed mixed findings on the impact of digital triage and many were conducted long time ago, before the use of digital triage in services was well established. This project aims to address these mixed findings through the analysis of large datasets from established services that use digital triage. Ultimately the aim is to better understand how telephone triage is used and to identify areas for improvement in the digital triage tool and the way services are delivered, in order to benefit patient care.
REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/LO/0184
Date of REC Opinion
3 Mar 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion