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. 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.
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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