How to Handle Patient Qualification & Disqualification

One common aspect of patient intake and onboarding is determining the qualification status of an individual. This attribute can be used to drive patients into specific journeys and workflows or prevent them from entering certain journeys and workflows. While this process can vary greatly in terms of complexity from one use case to the next, the guide below outlines how to implement the basic steps needed to qualify or disqualify patients (accounting for implementation with Tellescope's native form builder or with an external form builder like Formsort or a custom built form).

Initial Steps Within Tellescope

1. Within Tellescope, navigate to Settings > Organization.
2. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click the 'ADD' button to add a custom field to all patients' profiles.
3. Click the pencil icon on the field to edit. Name the field Qualification. Input type should be 'Select'. List one option that is 'Qualified' and a second option that is 'DQ'. Click the 'SAVE' button.
   

Steps for qualification with Tellescope's form builder

If you have an existing patient intake form, you would complete the following steps in that form. If not, you would want to create a new form.

1. Build out your form flow and collect the information needed to qualify or disqualify a patient.
2. When you've collected the necessary information and get to a point in which you're ready to determine if a patient is disqualified, you'll branch in two directions.
   
   
   1. Default Branch:
      1A. Add a new question and connect it to the previous. This will be the default path patients will travel down. It's important to note that traveling down this branch does not have to indicate that a patient is qualified. You can have multiple points where you branch to disqualify patients if needed.
      1B. If you will be qualifying a patient at this point, edit the newly added question. Set the question title field to 'Qualified'. Select the 'Hidden Value' question type (Hidden Values are not displayed to the patient). For the Update Patient Profile section, set the Patient Field dropdown to 'Custom Field' and the Custom Field name to 'Qualification. When a patient passes this point in the form flow, their profile will be updated to indicate that they are qualified.
      
   2. Disqualified Branch:
      2A. Add a new question field and connect it to the previous. Select 'Advanced' for the Logic Type. Proceed to select the question from the first dropdown, the condition from the second dropdown, and enter the value in the last input. The idea here is that you are assessing the answers provided up to this point by the customer against whatever predefined qualification criteria you have defined. For example, if the patient's state equals LA, they should be disqualified. You can reference this advanced logic guide for more information on logic selections/conditions.
      
      2B. Now that you've added the conditional logic to get to this point, edit the question itself. Set the question title field to 'DQ'. Select the 'Hidden Value' question type (Hidden Values are not displayed to the patient). For the Update Patient Profile section, set the Patient Field dropdown to 'Custom Field' and the Custom Field name to 'Qualification. When a patient passes this point in the form flow, their profile will be updated to indicate that they are disqualified.
      
      2C. It's likely that at this point, you will want to prevent the patient from going back through the form to change answers. Additionally, you may want to prevent form submission altogether. To accomplish this, set the next step in the flow as a 'Description' type. You can display a disqualification message to the patient and toggle the settings to prevent going back or submitting.
      
3. Proceed with creating the remainder of your form flow.

Steps for qualification with an external/custom form builder

The exact steps for handling logic can vary depending on the form builder, but the following should act as general steps to follow.

1. Build out your form flow and collect the information needed to qualify or disqualify a patient.
2. If you determine that the patient is qualified, the following answer information should be sent to Tellescope in the form response payload:
   {
    "key": "ts_enduser_Qualification",
    "value": "Qualified",
   }
3. Alternatively, if you determine that the patient is disqualified, the following answer information should be sent to Tellescope in the form response payload:
   {
    "key": "ts_enduser_Qualification",
    "value": "DQ",
   }
4. In the event that the patient drops off before qualification is determined, you can exclude the value from the payload completely.

Note: For more information regarding variable mapping to Tellescope fields, reference this guide. For more specifics regarding the exact payload structure, reference our API documentation.

Common Pitfalls to be Mindful of

Throughout this process, it's important to keep in mind that these fields are case sensitive and need to match exactly. The inclusion of a leading or trailing space in any of the fields outlined above could prevent this workflow from working properly.