What is the Symptom Checker?
The symptom checker is an automatic symptom triage tool for patients available within the Appointments section of our App.
It was introduced to help take the pressure off administrative teams, free up telephone lines and drive efficiencies.
What are the triage outcomes?
Our symptom checker takes patients through a set of questions to identify the issue and signpost them efficiently to the most appropriate next step, such as:
- Guiding them to call 111 or 999 if an urgent response is needed providing safety-netted timescales
- Signposting them to other, more appropriate healthcare providers
- Guiding them to book an appointment at the practice
- Directing them to self-help information if no appointment is needed
Indemnified triage
Our robust NICE accredited triage solution uses a unique clinical algorithm, enabling accurate identification of a patient’s symptoms to the most appropriate treatment, and recognises up to 1,200 presenting complaints, including areas such as mental health and Covid-19 symptoms.
Seamless workflow
All completed online consultations are automatically written to the patient record, where they appear as a consultation note, ensuring the triage outcome is available for the patient and clinician.
Patient journey on the app
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Screenshots |
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Once logged into the App, a patient selects 'Appointments' and then selects the option to 'Try our Symptom Checker' on their mobile app or on the web-browser Note: Only patients whose accounts were fully approved can access this feature |
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The patient then has the option to try the symptom checker or start an actual assessment |
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The patient then goes through triage This triage product is offered by Odyssey, which uses a NICE approved algorithm |
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Depending on the answers provided, the patient is navigated to the relevant services in the system |
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The information is then coded to a patient’s record every time a patient completes the checker, which available for the patient and clinician with access to the patient record. |
Data flow on the clinical system
The app uses a username 'Mr Substrakt Health' to connect to the clinical systems via our API.
This means that any outcome coded to the record is displayed as “e.g. Mr Substrakt Health”.
Example data on the clinical system
1. Summary
2. On the consultation tab
3. Expanded view
Frequently Asked Questions:
Question:
What are the possible outcomes of symptom checker?
Answer:
There are 5 outcomes on the symptom checker:
- Patient is directed to 111/999 services and provided an option to call
- Patient is navigated to 111 / Call GP urgently and provided an option to call
- Patient needs appointment within 24h and provided an option to call
- Patient needs a regular appointment - patient can see available appointments on the app
- Self-help - patient is navigated to the self help feature (patient info)
All of those questions and answers + outcome are coded to the record as online consultations (for completed triages).
In addition, all of the disposition outcomes record will use OneAdvanced Odyssey products with NICE accreditation approval.
All outcomes display 2 screens/stages (see below)
Variations of Stage 2 depending on the outcome:
Question:
What options are given to practices around symptom checkers? e.g is it possible to send via the workflow route instead of directly to the patients record?
Answer:
Currently, the outcomes are written directly to record.
The symptom checker can be enabled or disabled on practice level for all patients.
Future options we are exploring:
- The option to have symptom checker outcomes go to email (NHS.net mail only)
- The possibility of writing this as an entry + document
- Turn write to record functionality off by location
Question:
When where GP's enabled with this feature?
Answer:
This product has been commissioned by the CCG and was therefore rolled out to all live practices. For the majority of practices the checker would have gone live in July 2019 and the write to record functionality was enabled in May 2020.
Question:
Can Substrakt review the large data dump that goes into the patients record, the Clinical Safety Team felt that this is a large data dump, can it be condensed?
Answer:
At the time this feature was implemented, this was the only way to write the outcomes to a record in order to provide context around the online consultation a patient received on the app.
We are looking into the possibility of writing this as an entry + document.
Question:
Is this information only directly inputted into the patient record, only once a patient completes the patient checker and then books an appointment? Or is it every time?
Answer:
The information is coded every time a patient completes the checker to ensure the SC outcome is available for the patient and clinician.