TriageLogic is proud to announce its new patent-pending, Artificial Intelligence-based (AI) tool for medical message takers. Known as MedMessage Assist, this freestanding module prompts Answering Service Operators (ASOs) with the appropriate questions to ask patient callers to verify whether they’re experiencing symptoms that warrant urgent medical evaluation. The following breaks down why this technology is so revolutionary, how it benefits medical answering services, nurses and doctors, and how healthcare organizations can leverage this service for their own patient care.
Why MedMessage Assist Is So Important
It’s the responsibility of every healthcare provider (physicians or telehealth triage nurses) to get patient callers to the appropriate levels of care in the appropriate windows of time. Delays in care are dangerous to both patient health and practice liability. However, doctors and nurses are usually not the first points of contact that a patient has with a provider. Instead, it’s often a message intake service such as a front desk, a message portal, or an operator working at an answering service. These operators relay patient phone messages to providers.
Some patient symptoms may be relatively easy to identify as urgent, like a newborn experiencing a fever, or an adult with chest pain. But patients who call about refill requests, for example, may fail to mention a serious symptom that is more serious or even life-threatening. This can happen when patients are simply unaware of the urgency of their symptoms, or if the intake person does not know when to ask further questions.
This is where MedMessage Assist comes in: it analyzes the text being entered and automatically prompts the user with appropriate questions so that they can document concerning symptoms that a provider needs to know. This helps providers decrease morbidity and mortality due to lack of information.
Medical Call Center Results
Implementing MedMessage Assist can have a substantial influence on patient health outcomes. Approximately 100 million messages are relayed to doctors and nurses in the United States in a given month. Of those, an estimated 20 million are urgent cases. In one of TriageLogic’s studies, MedMessage Assist has already demonstrated a 30 percent increase in the accuracy of urgent message referrals, equal to six (6) million calls.
Implementing MedMessage Assist
MedMessage Assist is designed for easy implementation for any medical call center. It requires minimal training to get started and adds very little time to the call intake process.
As previously noted, this tool is self-standing: ASOs can use it right out of the box, or it can be seamlessly integrated with a provider’s current answering service software through MedMessage Assist’s prebuilt APIs and integration modules.
Medical Call Center Support
Turnover has been affecting much of the healthcare industry in recent years, even before the spread of COVID-19. That’s why we offer support services in addition to our MedMessage Assist tool.
For those providers who need medical answering services, we also offer Nurse Triage On Call. This program operates out of our own medical call center, which includes clinical and nonclinical staff. Our ASOs and registered nurses can become an extension of a provider’s practice, offering customized instructions on care dispositions that are specific to that provider. ASOs use MedMessage Assist to address incoming patient calls, while RNs serve as triage nurses to address these callbacks in the appropriate windows of time. Both clinical and nonclinical support are available 24/7. Additionally, our nurses leverage the gold standard of nurse triage protocols from Drs. Schmitt and Thompson in order to evaluate patient symptom severity.
Nurse Triage Evaluations and Training
TriageLogic ensures that all RNs undergo a strict evaluation process. This includes verifying their medical knowledge and experience, their listening skills for addressing patients over the phone, as well as their abilities to manage difficult calls and still obtain the information they need in order to generate accurate dispositions for care.
We also offer our own internal training and certification courses for nurses interested in expanding their skills in the areas of telephone triage and support. Information regarding this training can be found in our Learning Center, or discussed in a direct needs assessment with a provider’s team.
Patient Data Sharing and Security (SOC 2 Type 2)
For health systems that choose to partner with us for outsourced medical call center support, all patient interactions are documented in our nurse triage software, myTriageChecklist. This patient data is then shared directly with the appropriate providers for continuity of care. Data can either be integrated directly with a provider’s existing EHR, or through files that are compatible with it.
All information is HIPAA compliant and encrypted, following cybersecurity’s best practices for health care. TriageLogic is also getting SOC 2 certification.
Contact TriageLogic for More Information
Providers and medical call centers that are interested in using MedMessage Assist to improve the health outcomes of their patients are encouraged to contact TriageLogic to schedule an introductory call.
About TriageLogic
TriageLogic is a URAC-accredited, physician-led provider of top-quality nurse telehealth technology, remote patient monitoring, and medical call center solutions. Founded in 2007, the TriageLogic Group now serves more than 9,000 physicians and covers over 25 million lives nationwide.
