looking for home-based triage position

Debbie Cohen · Mar 15, 2004

No but I am doing homework on telephone triage and could use some help (if you would):
1. Why would a 36 year old man with severe chest pains, mild fever, slightly elevated bp and tachycardia deteriorate in status in a matter of 3 hours. Respiration is slightly above normal
2.A 43 year old woman with a bad headache ends up in critacal condition after waiting 4 hours in the emegergency room. She has a fever of 101.2
3.A 55 year old man with high bp but with a normal temperature ends up critical after waiting 3 hours. He has no fever and his pulse is slightly above normal.

- - - - - -

Off the top of my head...:

1Possibly a percarditis

2. Possibly meningial in origin

3. Stroke? Not enough info really.

Saying that they *end up critical* is a little rough to sift through.

These were actual cases or part of a course or what?

:) Hope that helps!

Heron

GLORIAmunchkin72 · Mar 15, 2004

Thanks so much Debbie,

I really didn't expect a feedback. Thanks for taking the time to answer. This will give me a starting point. Prior to this I had no clue.

Munchkin

Su360 · Apr 14, 2004

Hello Jana,

You might try Intellicare (phone triage nursing). They have home agents and I am on a waiting list for Orlando, Fla. I currently work in Michigan

with their program on phone triage. Try accessing them through the Web @

http://www.Intellicare.com. They are home based in Portland, Maine.

Su360 :

Does anybody out there know of any national companies that offer home-based telephone triage positions? I am well-experienced in phone triage but recently moved to an area with no triage jobs. I have one lead--Intellicare in Dallas TX. Does anybody know of any others? Thanks

Su360 · Apr 14, 2004

Heres my guess:

1. possible PE

2.Meningitis

3.CVA

4. poor ER protocal/ training for triage :)

No but I am doing homework on telephone triage and could use some help (if you would):
1. Why would a 36 year old man with severe chest pains, mild fever, slightly elevated bp and tachycardia deteriorate in status in a matter of 3 hours. Respiration is slightly above normal
2.A 43 year old woman with a bad headache ends up in critacal condition after waiting 4 hours in the emegergency room. She has a fever of 101.2
3.A 55 year old man with high bp but with a normal temperature ends up critical after waiting 3 hours. He has no fever and his pulse is slightly above normal.

Su360 · Apr 15, 2004

The range for Phone Triage Nurses in Michigan is $23.-$27./hr. Chance for OT usually is good. I ranged in the high 50's last year but had 9,000 in OT.

Interesting subject. Can you give us a salary range for rn's without actually telling us what you're making, unless you want to share? Thanks a Bunch.

Rigby · May 2, 2004

Hello Jana,
You might try Intellicare (phone triage nursing). They have home agents and I am on a waiting list for Orlando, Fla. I currently work in Michigan
with their program on phone triage. Try accessing them through the Web @
www.Intellicare.com. They are home based in Portland, Maine.
Su360 :

Which software does Intellicare use?

shellseeker · Jun 21, 2004

I have 10 years experience in telephone triage and recently found Intellicare on the web, but it didn't give any information about nurse triage positions. I plan to call them. Your information is quite interesting. I'm in a life changing mode and interested in spending some time at the ocean, but then returning home to the midwest. If I could take my job with me it would increase my financial stability, but with a mobility that I long for. May I ask if you did your training in Portland? How long did you have to train before you were able to work from home? What kind of software does Intellicare use? The one I'm currently working with is CECC, which leaves much to be desired. Does anyone get demographics before the nurse's get the calls, or do you have to do your own? Again, thanks for lots of good information.

I work for that company, but only for the last 9 months. Prior to that I did telephone triage for 5 years with another company. So I can kind of compare. i'll try to give you my honest opinions, the good and bad.
Intellicare is growing by leaps and bounds. They do buy out other triage centers, so I'm not sure if that's where the bad rep might have come from. They also land several new accounts every month. I can't quote exactly, but they have over 50 accounts. The good news is that makes them a very solid company to work for, no fears about it going out of business. The bad news is that's alot of accounts/clients to learn. Clients are private doctor offices, insurance companies, one section of the DOD.
They do allow you to work from home, in fact 75% of the nurses working for them do. I do. I love it. And if you move, you can take the job with you. That's huge bonus for me, as I plan to relocate this summer and worries about finding a job across the country are gone. If you are full time, they furnish your computer and give you an allowance to pay for your internet connection, which must be high speed. I had a second phone line installed and got an allowance towards that as well.
They record all calls, which most major triage centers should do. We have approved guidelines and a system for charting. There's not alot of free text charting, which makes it faster. My last job was almost all free text charting, which is slower and less exact. We also have approved sites and texts for referrence. And an researcher to get any info to answer questions we cannot find easily.
You are expected to take so many calls an hour, and handle the calls in a certain time frame. In fact, you must get the time of an average call down to 10 minutes, which I did find hard to do. Call times must be at 10 minutes average before you can "go remote" and work from home. It's very busy, calls are almost always lined up. So if you don't want to work hard, this is not for you.
After working for them for 1 year, they will compensate you the cost of taking the national triage exams, which I plan to do. They encourage their nurses to do this, which I thinks bodes well.
The down side? Because one works from home, they expect you to be pretty darn flexible with your hours. This has been a problem at times. I hired on as a evening nurse hoping to get days..which I did after 3 months or so. But every once in awhile, they still schedule me for late evenings and I find that hard. But they allow nurses to trade hours pretty freely. That aspect has improved since I've been there, but still could be better. They need to appreciate the fact that a schedule is very important to many nurses. I don't think they have yet to realize just how important this aspect is. My schedule really sucks sometimes, working till midnight and then back on again at 7am. Keep in mind I don't take a 30 minute break, so the chances for eating are pretty slim for those 2 days. I'm still going round on this issue. They say they won't schedule you with shifts any closer than 12 hours, but the same day I was told this, they scheduled me for shifts 7 hours apart. I'm still upset.
They do have a high turnover, and say they are working on it. Lots of nurses have this as their second job, as a way of making extra money. Working from home makes it an ideal second job. However, I am there full time, and it's my only job. I think some nurses leave because once they don't need a second job, they leave. Sometimes, I think schedules have been an issue. It still is a problem for me sometimes, but I have seen an improvement. 30 minue lunch breaks are optional. If you take one, there are not paid for. Most don't take them. Of course we do get 15 minute breaks as per law.
Once working from home, I do 4 9hours shifts a week. I am expected to be oncall the other 4 hours a week ( for a total of 40 hours/weekly) as part of the "privilege" of working from home. You don't get paid for oncall hours unless they are worked. I also think they expect alot in return for the 'privilege" of working from home. Sometimes too much, IMHO. I'd like to see this improve.
I took a cut in pay to take this job. I figure the loss in salary was offset by the money I saved in gas, wear and tear on my car, my commute time ( which was 45 minutes each way in rush hour), no new clothing ( I had to dress in business attire for previous job)....and like I said, I was wanting to work from home, and wanted to relocate. The fact I can take this job with me will allow me to move to a small town/city in Az without having go back to a hospital. A big plus in my book.
I had telephone triage experince prior to this, as well as disease management, and lots of years as a nurse on the floors. Intellicare is hard work, you're busy and sometimes the upper management can be a bear and not easy to deal with. But my immediate teamleader is great. It's hard to learn the rules for different accounts. For some accounts we page their oncall docs, some we don't. Some we book appointments for, some we don't. For some we send out educational materials, some we don't. It can be daunting.
I hope this helps. I can say I love working from home. I save 1.5 hours daily by not driving, my car will last a lot longer, no worries about driving in bad weather, I use very little gas now. I work in sweats and fuzzy slippers in the winter!

movealong · Jun 22, 2004

I trained in the St Louis office for about 3 months. Others completed the training process quicker, some longer. Your average length of talk time on a call must be ~10 minutes before you can start working from home. I came from a previous job setting where length of calls was not really monitored, so it was a little hard for me to break old habits.

Demographics are usually already in the system, we just verify them. But if we can't find a member in the database, then we have to gather the info and load them into the system.

Intellicare has their own system/software. It's pretty easy to use.

Keep watching for postions. They just hired a few nurses for nights in the last month.

shellseeker · Jun 23, 2004

I trained in the St Louis office for about 3 months. Others completed the training process quicker, some longer. Your average length of talk time on a call must be ~10 minutes before you can start working from home. I came from a previous job setting where length of calls was not really monitored, so it was a little hard for me to break old habits.
Demographics are usually already in the system, we just verify them. But if we can't find a member in the database, then we have to gather the info and load them into the system.
Intellicare has their own system/software. It's pretty easy to use.
Keep watching for postions. They just hired a few nurses for nights in the last month.

Thanks for the information.

Does Intellicare offer benefits? If so are they available for part time employees?

You mentioned you work 9 hour shifts. Do they have a range of shifts available? Where I work now we have 6, 8, and 12 hour shifts available.

Do you know how many contracts (clients) Intellicare has? If it's a large number, do you as a triage nurse have to know the details of all the contracts (such as which dr wants to be called after hours, etc), or do you just work with a limited number?

movealong · Jun 23, 2004

They do let nurses work different amount of hours for their shifts. They do offer benefits (I'm single, so I have to have a job with benefits). I believe they are prorated for part timers. They also use perdiems.

You must have either DSL or cable for a fast internet connection. I'm thinking of relocating and bringing my job with me, but had to rule out one small town, as they only had dial up.

They have a large list of clients/contracts ( I forget how many but I think it's more than 100?), and yes, we do have to know for each client whether we page the doctors or not, make appointments etc. When you pull a member from each database to your screeen, a list of "rules" for that specific client is shown. These "rules" will tell you if you need to page an oncall, whether they will refill prescriptions after hours, whether you can book appointments, the hours that office is open, whether the office has weekend hours, and sometimes we even have driving directions listed to tell patients how to get to the office. We have way too many clients to be expected to remember the rules for each on our own. But you know how it is, some clients have more members, and one becomes familiar with that client's rules quicker.

I've been working at home for almost 1 year now. I love it.

intellicareRN · Jan 23, 2005

:) dear movealong,

I work there too, do I know you ??? :)

Going80INA55 · Jan 31, 2005

It has been a LOOOONG time since I posted here. After reading this post I emailed intellicare. The recruiter replied to my email the next day and Friday we have an INformal conversation set up. Any tips??