Telephone Medicine: Triage and Training for Primary Care [Paperback]

M.D. Katz Harvey P. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2001

The staff member who takes a call from a patient must be trained to recognize which calls represent emergencies and which do not. This text offers guidelines for assessing calls, written at an appropriate level for the medical office assistant and organized by complaint;chapters on individual complaints which cover adults and children and provide staff with background information and a list of questions to ask; home health care advice for each problem; guidance on risk management for physician and staff; and sample cases for training and evaluation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 279 pages
• Publisher: F. A. Davis Company; 2 Sub edition (March 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803604351
• ISBN-13: 978-0803604353
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,257,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for telephone medicine, June 4, 2001

By 

Robert Dershewitz, MD (Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Telephone Medicine: Triage and Training for Primary Care (Paperback)

This practical and useful book is an excellent resource on training office staff on the art of telephone medicine. It will be a valuable teaching tool for students and clinicians at all levels to learn how (as Dr. Katz says) "to tame the telephone". After all, no clinician, whether MDs, NPs or PAs are able to escape using telephones in their practices. In addition, this edition is now available to the public to help patients use the phone more effectively when calling their doctor.

This revised edition expands upon its original pediatric focus to now include adult medicine. The most common symptoms of why pediatric and adult patients call their physician have been selected for the guidelines. All chapters follow the same format, thus being user-friendly for both office staff and clinicians. Practical guidelines for determining if and when a patient needs to be seen are presented clearly in all the clinical chapters.

Two other notable strengths of this well-written book are: its focus on quality improvement and its discussion on how to reduce risk of malpractice.

I showed this book to a nurse in my office, asking if she would find it useful for telephone triage. Her response was quite favorable. This is the kind of reaction that I expect would be typical for Dr. Katz's book.