Telephone Triage in Primary Care Prevents Unnecessary Office Visits

Many primary care practices are seeking to improve quality of care and patient satisfaction without adding to workload or costs. In some practices, nurses or physicians triage urgent patient calls through initial telephone consultations rather than have receptionists schedule same-day office visits, but the effects of this strategy have not been measured in large-scale trials. Investigators in the U.K. randomized 42 primary care practices to telephone triage by physicians or by nurses (with computerized algorithm support) or to usual care. In triage practices, patients who called with urgent concerns received prompt return phone calls from nurses or physicians, who either addressed problems definitively by phone or planned further managemen…