THE DATA QUALITY HOSPITAL – Part 5 – “Non-urgent cases” (free excerpt)

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Non-urgent cases

Finally, some data patients are assessed as being Non-Urgent. Details about these data patients are logged, but they are then directed to data doctors in their local community to deal with.

Whilst your initial thought is that this group of data patients isn’t a major concern, you pause for a moment. What if these people are mis-diagnosed and deteriorate when they return home? What if they come back, with the same symptoms? Would we know?

You’ve already decided that the Triage prioritisation approach is appropriate, but you also ask for your team to keep an eye on non-urgent cases for follow-up data. For example, from now on, when data people are sent back to their local community data doctors, a message will be sent to their local doctors to inform them that they should expect them to visit, and there is a request to receive an update once they’ve been seen. This new step is deliberately setup to work with as little effort as possible, for example there isn’t a need to actively follow up on every case, but once a month there’s a review of the data to see if the hospital has been receiving follow-up messages from local community doctors about non-urgent data people who have been referred with particular symptoms.

The other thing you do, is to add a step to the initial Triage process to check the data person’s records to see if they’ve been in to visit recently, so that repeat visits can be identified, because this could indicate that there’s something more serious going on than originally thought and may result in a different Triage decision.

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