Telephone Triage in Today's Oncology Practice

Telephone triage is an essential component of today’s oncology practice, and it has grown in importance as the care of patients with cancer has transitioned from the inpatient to the outpatient setting in the last 20 years. Just as the face-to-face care of cancer patients in the office and outpatient setting has become increasingly complex, so too has the management of telephone calls from patients with cancer. Oncology practices today must have systems in place to expedite the telephone triage process and ensure that patients receive timely and appropriate responses to their telephone calls. In this issue of Journal of Oncology Practice, Flannery et al1 report an interesting single-site study of telephone calls in ambulatory oncology. There is little information in the literature concerning telephone calls in oncology practice, and this article presents an interesting approach to studying this