How Healthcare Providers Decide on a Referral Location in Telephone Triage: A Cross-sectional Study.

Background: Approximately 25% of patients that present to the emergency department (ED) do so after contact with a healthcare professional. Many of these patients could be effectively managed in non-ED ambulatory settings. Aligning patients with safe and appropriate outpatient care has the potential to improve ED overcrowding, patient experience, outcomes, and costs. Little is understood about how healthcare providers approach triage decision-making and what factors influence their choices.

Objectives: To evaluate how providers think about patient triage, and what factors influence their decision-making when triaging patient calls.

Design: Cross-sectional survey-based study in which participants make triage decisions for hypothetical clinical scenarios.

Participants: Healthcare providers in the specialties of internal medicine, family medicine, or emergency medicine within a large integrated healthcare system in the Southeast.

Main measures: Differences in individual training and practice characteristics were used to compare observed differences in triage outcomes. Free-response data were evaluated to identify themes and factors affecting triage decisions.

Key results: Out of 72 total participants, substantial variability in triage decision-making was observed among all patient cases. Attending physicians triaged 1.4 fewer cases to ED care compared with resident physicians (p < 0.001, 95% CI 0.62-2.1). Academic attendings demonstrated a trend toward fewer cases to ED care compared with community attendings (0.61, p = 0.188, 95% CI - 0.31-1.5). Qualitative data highlighted the complex considerations in provider triage and led to the development of a novel conceptual model to describe the cognitive triage process and the main influencing factors.

Conclusions: Triage decision-making for healthcare providers is influenced by many factors related to clinical resources, care coordination, patient factors, and clinician factors. The complex considerations involved yield variability in triage decisions that is largely unexplained by descriptive physician factors.