Abstract
BackgroundTelephone-based digital triage is widely used by services that provide urgent care. This involves a call handler or clinician using a digital triage tool to generate algorithm-based care advice, based on a patient’s symptoms. Advice typically takes the form of signposting within defined levels of urgency to specific services or self-care advice. Despite wide adoption, there is limited evaluation of its impact on service user experience, service use and clinical outcomes; no previous systematic reviews have focussed on services that utilise digital triage, and its impact on these outcome areas within urgent care. This review aims to address this need, particularly now that telephone-based digital triage is well established in healthcare delivery.MethodsStudies assessing the impact of telephone-based digital triage on service user experience, health care service use and clinical outcomes will be identified through searches conducted in Medline, Embase, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Web of Science and Scopus. Search terms using words relating to digital triage and urgent care settings (excluding in-hours general practice) will be used. The review will include all original study types including qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods studies; studies published in the last 20 years and studies published in English. Quality assessment of studies will be conducted using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT); a narrative synthesis approach will be used to analyse and summarise findings.DiscussionThis is the first systematic review to evaluate service user experience, service use and clinical outcomes related to the use of telephone-based digital triage in urgent care settings. It will evaluate evidence from studies of wide-ranging designs. The narrative synthesis approach will enable the integration of findings to provide new insights on service delivery. Models of urgent care continue to evolve rapidly, with the emergence of self-triage tools and national help lines. Findings from this review will be presented in a practical format that can feed into the design of digital triage tools, future service design and healthcare policy.Systematic review registrationThis systematic review is registered on the international database of prospectively registered systematic reviews in health and social care (PROSPERO 2020 CRD42020178500).
Highlights
Telephone-based digital triage is widely used by services that provide urgent care
Systematic review registration: This systematic review is registered on the international database of prospectively registered systematic reviews in health and social care (PROSPERO 2020 CRD42020178500)
This review seeks to evaluate the impact of telephonebased digital triage by urgent care services on service user experience, and patients’ clinical and service use outcomes
Summary
Telephone-based digital triage is widely used by services that provide urgent care. This involves a call handler or clinician using a digital triage tool to generate algorithm-based care advice, based on a patient’s symptoms. Different types of services utilise telephone-based digital triage, including national or regional help-lines, out-of-hours centres and emergency care providers. Examples of telephone-based services include England’s National Health Service (NHS) 111 service, Scotland’s NHS 24 service, Denmark’s medical help line (MH1813), Australia’s HealthDirect and the MayoClinic telephone service based in the USA [4,5,6,7,8,9] Digital triage within these services involves a care service staff member using a digital triage tool to generate algorithm-based care advice, based on a patient’s symptoms. Advice typically takes the form of signposting within defined levels of urgency to specific services, such as an emergency department (ED), out-of-hours centre, general practice (GP) appointment or self-care advice
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