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Answering Service vs After-Hours Nurse Triage

By July 6, 2022No Comments

“What’s the difference between an answering service and after-hours nurse triage?”

 

When it comes to providing the best experience for your patients, it’s important to keep them within the medical home. Convenience continues to be a driving factor in a parent’s decision-making process, and this has led to higher rates of retail clinic visits or relying on Dr. Google to triage their child’s needs. This decreases revenue for your practice and diminishes the pediatrician-child relationship that is at the center of the medical home.

An answering service is an outdated after-hours triage model that inherently reduces connectivity to patients, relying on impersonal, national call centers to handle patient volume. After-hours nurse triage provides higher quality care by bringing patients back into the medical home through phone and video services. Calls are routed through nurses with a minimum of five years of ER and telephone triage experience. Calls are then handled by the nurses, routed to the on-call pediatrician for a video visit, or scheduled for an in-person visit the next day.

After-hours nurse triage drives revenue back to the practice and improves the medical home for the patient: only 5% of calls have the disposition, “Go to ED Now”, whereas the national call center average is 14%.

Learn more about how your practice can benefit from using Anytime After Hours.