Glossary, front desk
What is triage in a clinic?
Triage is sorting patients and their requests by how urgently they need care and sending each one to the right person or service.
Also called patient triage or clinical triage.
Why Triage matters to a clinic
Most of what reaches a front desk is routine, and a small share is urgent. The risk is the urgent message sitting in the same queue as a question about parking, so triage is a safety process as much as an efficiency one.
Clinical judgement stays with clinicians. Software can sort and flag, and a person with the right training decides what happens to anything clinical.
Questions
Can software triage patients?
Software can sort and flag requests. Clinical triage, deciding how urgently a patient needs care, belongs to a trained clinician.
What happens to an urgent message at night?
That depends on the clinic's own escalation rules and out-of-hours cover, which every clinic should set out in writing. See patient messaging.
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A 15 minute video call on your own diary, notes and inbox. Prices for clinics, groups and hospitals are on the pricing page.
In a clinic it starts at the first contact, when a message or call is read and routed.
Updated . Defined by the Wai team for clinics, groups and health systems.