After-Hours Call Screening May Lead to Errors
Doctors’ answering-machine systems should not ask patients to decide whether their condition is an emergency because patients don’t really know whether it’s an emergency, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
The study analyzed calls to a doctors’ office over the course of one year and found that telephone triage systems could lead to serious harm to patients, for example, those who have mild chest pain but are in fact having a heart attack.
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