How to Make Your Teletriage Process More Effective 

A nurse teletriage line provides your workers with access to trained medical professionals any time, day or night. This helps them get the level of care they need for their work-related injuries, whether they receive basic first aid recommendations and return to their duties or they need to travel to an emergency room for further treatment. 

While having a telephone triage service available to your employees helps you save on medical costs, decreases your workers’ compensation claims levels and lessens your OSHA recordables rates, ensuring your teletriage process is giving your workers the care they need is critical to ensuring your provider is right for your needs. Here are five ways to make your teletriage process more effective. 

Ensure Workers Know Where to Call 

If your employees don’t know where to call when they get injured, they aren’t going to utilize the teletriage line and, instead, will be more likely to head to the emergency room for even minor conditions. 

Your workers need to know exactly what to do if they’re injured, and you can’t just rely on site or shift supervisors to give out that information. 

Some ways you can ensure your workers know where to call include: 

• Incorporating an overview of your teletriage service, including where to find the phone number to call, in all onboarding training 
• Giving a refresher of the nurse triage service and contact information for the nurse line at annual safety trainings, team meetings and other gatherings 
• Ensuring each breakroom and restroom, as well as any other centralized gathering spaces, have posters with the teletriage phone number clearly listed 
• Including a teletriage flier into any training or site manuals handed out to employees 
• Sending out occasional reminder emails regarding the program, its benefits and the phone number 
• Encouraging workers to save the teletriage phone number into their work or personal cellphones for easy access in an emergency 

The more you communicate with your workers about how to access the nurse triage service and its benefits, the better your chances they will make a call when someone is injured. 

Streamline Reporting 

Utilizing digital reporting tools, including dashboards that allow you to create custom reports to show the information you need, helps you get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your teletriage program. If you’re able to see details such as claims rates decreasing or teletriage usage increasing over time, you will have a much clearer picture of whether your investment in your nurse triage programs is paying off for your employees. 

When selecting a nurse triage service, or asking your current service to help you improve the reporting you get, some metrics to consider tracking include: 

• Specific call types 
• Location-specific reporting (if you have multiple worksites) 
• Injury report timing 
• Daily call volume 

These data points can help you not only see whether your employees are utilizing your nurse triage line, but also what types of injuries are being reported and how rapidly those injuries are being called in. This information can help you make improvements to your worksite that may reduce rates of preventable injuries, decreasing your overall injury rates, medical costs and OSHA recordables. 

Upgrade Injury-Related Communications 

When employees go offsite for care, it can be difficult to know whether they are required to get any follow-up treatment, how long they may be off work and other critical details about the extent of their injuries. You are relying on the employee — who may be seriously injured — to communicate with you their doctor’s recommendations. This can lead to confusion and may even cause workers to return to duties before they’re supposed to. 

Having records from an injured worker’s first encounter with a medical professional, as well as the recommendations from that encounter, gives you a better understanding of the extent of employee injuries and their path to healing. Workers who only need first aid recommendations, for example, can be treated quickly and return to duties.  

For those workers who require next-day follow-up care, having those instructions in a report you receive from the nurse triage line can help you ensure the employee makes the time to seek that care. This helps your workers heal faster and more completely, getting them back to work when they are ready. 

Each encounter also includes the nurse on the other end of the line taking the employee’s personal contact information. This allows for easy follow-up directly with the employee, helping them better understand the instructions they’re given and making them more likely to comply. 

Review Call Recordings 

Knowing how effective your teletriage program is goes beyond seeing the results in how worker injuries are treated. In order to ensure your nurse triage program is high quality and that the correct steps are taken in evaluating worker injuries, it’s important to routinely review call recordings. 

Your teletriage provider should record every employee encounter and regularly review them for quality control and compliance with medical protocols. You should also be able to access some of these recordings, or at least review transcripts from the calls. 

By doing this, you will be able to ensure that the people you are entrusting your workers’ care with are the right match. This will help you improve worker satisfaction with your nurse triage service and, in turn, increase the likelihood that workers will utilize the service if it is trustworthy. 

Track & Analyze Trends 

Regular reporting on your company’s use of your teletriage service should be standard. Reviewing these reports is important, but you must go beyond viewing those reports in a vacuum. Taking the extra step to look at trends in the injuries you’re seeing, care recommendations and worker return-to-work rates is key to knowing that your nurse triage service is working for you. 

Many teletriage services provide access to this trended data, but if yours doesn’t, keeping tabs on data points that are important to you and your workers’ health can be done in a spreadsheet or other similar tool. Looking at number of calls to the triage line when compared with overall injuries in the same time period, types of injuries and recommended treatment, for example, will help you see whether your workers are utilizing the service and the care they receive.  

Additionally, tracking data about injuries, how they happen and when they happen can provide valuable insights on the safety and other conditions of your worksite. If you see that a number of injuries happen in the same location on your worksite over time, you can assess the area for hazards that could be mitigated to prevent further injuries. 

Your 24/7 Injury & Illness Triage Partner 

At Medcor, providing your employees with the best care for their work-related injuries, in the right place, is our main goal. Our 24/7 injury and illness triage service, staffed by certified and experienced nurses, helps you provide quality care at all hours. Speak with an advocate today.