What is Outcome Recording?
Outcome Recording allows you to record the outcome (eg telephone appointment, or a referral) of your conversations with patients 🔎.
This will be beneficial to keep track of the outcomes of your conversations and give a better understanding of how inbound work is being handled.
How does it work?
When you mark any conversation as done, a box will appear in the conversation thread with a list of outcomes as shown in the screenshot below 👇.
You can record the outcome of the conversation by selecting one from the list. Once selected, you can save the outcome to the patient’s record or edit the outcome using the options shown below.
Once you have started recording outcomes, you can view the data on the Patient Triage dashboard page which shows you:
Data on how requests are submitted, how the volume of requests changes over time and create reports to gain a better understanding of your patients and your organisation's workflow to help inform your decision-making, like staffing levels or access times.
We also have a chart on the dashboard (see the example below), which breaks down any outcomes recorded for Patient Triage requests this week and last week. There is a “Not Recorded” column which shows how many requests have been marked as done without an outcome being recorded.
Please note: The Outcome Recording dashboard will only show outcomes recorded for Patient Triage conversations.
Outcomes recorded for other conversation types (eg standard SMS messages, Self-Book messages, etc) won't contribute to the data in this section.
Helping with Selecting Outcomes
We recommend you record the outcome of the conversation at the point you know what the triage decision is 🎯.
An example of Outcome Recording
An example of Outcome Recording
A Patient Triage request comes in regarding a patient with a sore throat so you send the Sore Throat Florey for more information. If you then:
Decide they need to be seen, the outcome would be Face-to-face.
Decide they don’t need to be seen, rather you prescribe them a medication, the outcome would be Prescription.
Decide they didn’t need a prescription because they were clinically well and could pick up some medication from the pharmacy, the outcome could be Signposted.
What are the outcomes available to choose from?
The following outcomes are available to record, along with some explanations and the associated SNOMED code of each:
Face-to-face 🗣: the patient has a face-to-face consultation arranged
Video 📹: the patient has a video consultation arranged
Telephone 📞: the patient has a telephone consultation arranged
Home visit 🏠: the patient has a home visit arranged
Advice 🩺: the patient has been messaged with medical advice (e.g. wait and see if the symptoms worsen, then get in contact again)
Prescription 💊: you have issued a new or repeat prescription for the patient
Referral 🎫: the patient has been formally referred to another service (e.g. a cardiology department at a hospital)
Signposted 📫: the patient has been signposted to an available service (e.g. smoking cessation services)
Admin Message 📔: the patient has been messaged non non-medical information (e.g. sending a fit note)
Other ➰: not covered by the above. Please describe the outcome, this will be visible in the conversation thread but not in the Patient Triage dashboard.
Benefits and Values
We believe that recording the outcomes of conversations will provide a lot of value to practices 💎.
We currently provide visibility of the work flowing into your practice, who is completing the work, and how much is being completed. However, Outcome Recording will provide you with an extra layer of insights: what this work actually results in.
Having this information at your disposal will enable you to see areas for improvement in how you are triaging, for example:
How many requests are leading to synchronous appointments (i.e. face to face, telephone, video, home visit)?
How many requests are easily dealt with asynchronously (e.g. medical advice being messaged, or admin messages)?
How many requests are generating administrative work that may often not be captured (e.g. prescriptions, referrals, signposting)?
And therefore, how can we improve the consistency and efficiency of how we are handling work, as a practice?
FAQs
Who is the feature available for?
We have turned this feature on for all practices who have access to Patient Triage, our online consultation tool.
Can I only record the outcomes of Patient Triage conversations?
No, you can record an outcome for any conversation you mark as done. That being said, we have focused on Patient Triage because we think they will be the most valuable conversations to record outcomes of.Only data around outcomes of Patient Triage conversations will add to the "Requests by outcome" dashboard.
Can I turn this feature off?
We think this feature will be useful to every practice we release to (Patient Triage users), so we hope that there is no need to turn it off! Especially as recording an outcome is optional.
That being said if you want to turn off the feature, a member of our support team can help you - please reach out to us through the normal support channels.
Can I add custom outcomes or suggest new outcomes?
The initial release of the feature does not allow for custom outcomes to be added; we may consider this functionality in the future.
However, we will be monitoring the ‘Other’ outcome internally to see if there are consistent trends across practices that warrant adding more outcomes to the predefined list. To that end, we please ask that no personally identifiable information (PII) is entered as part of the ‘Other’ description.
If you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to chat with us using the green message bubble in the bottom right-hand corner of this page. 👉