Customize Your Path to Care Using TriageLogic’s Schmitt-Thompson Protocol Editor

As telehealth evolves, healthcare organizations are expanding nurse capabilities in areas like telephone triage, remote patient monitoring, postop discharge, and chronic care management. This requires both flexibility and the means to adapt nurse telehealth protocols — including the industry standard developed by Drs. Schmitt and Thompson — to fit organization-specific needs. TriageLogic’s protocol editor is the only one on the market today with all of the features required to fully customize protocols with the proper change management. Here’s why:

1. It Customizes a Path to Care

Schmitt-Thompson protocols function as a decision tree based on the severity of a patient’s reported symptoms. This allows a telehealth nurse to guide the patient to the most appropriate level of care. But some organizations may want to change the advice that’s offered, like recommending a patient follow-up with their doctor within 24 hours of experiencing symptoms, rather than 72. The same goes for specifying which OTC medications to recommend to patients, which hospitals to refer them to, or the discharge instructions that should be given — in other words, a level of nurse triage similar to concierge healthcare.

2. It Maintains a Log of Protocol Iterations

Any time that organizations update their care policies, it’s important to keep a record of what changes were made, when, and why. This not only improves documentation against liability, it allows them to revert to the original versions of their protocols as needed.

For example, H1N1 is no longer as much of a health concern as it once was, so an organization may choose not to include its protocols. But if H1N1 were to have a resurgence, these protocols could still be accessed and added back to the decision tree. The same goes for managing seasonal protocols, as well as preventing annual Schmitt-Thompson updates from overwriting any custom protocols an organization already has.

Our editor even allows users to activate or deactivate protocols on demand, preview any modifications before they’re complete, and change specific sections within a standard protocol without affecting the rest.

3. It Integrates with Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM)

RPM has grown in popularity as an advanced warning system for managing chronic health patients, as well as an incentive for organizations to improve their value-based care. Having the ability to incorporate RPM’s data collection and review into the triage process is therefore essential. For example, if an RPM device records a patient’s heart rate as elevated over a certain duration of time, a custom protocol can instruct a nurse to contact the patient and advise them to see a specialist even if that patient isn’t currently experiencing any other symptoms. This can lead to better health outcomes and substantial revenue saved by the organization.

Need Modifications to Your Protocols?

If you think that your organization’s telehealth nurse triage would benefit from customized protocols, we’re ready to help. Contact us to discuss implementation, as well as updating to the latest Schmitt-Thompson version.