After-hours nurse triage, an RN on every call.

Most services price one of two ways. Per-call pricing looks cheap until a bad night, and medical answering services commonly quote per minute, which means a long clinical call costs you more precisely when it mattered most. TULQ prices a flat monthly subscription based on your call volume band and coverage window, so the number does not move when a patient has a hard week.

The figure worth putting next to it is the avoided cost. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker puts the average emergency department visit at roughly $2,453. A single avoided, genuinely unnecessary ED visit covers a meaningful share of a month of coverage.

An answering service takes a message. The person on the phone is not a clinician, cannot assess a symptom, and cannot make a care decision, so every call that matters gets forwarded to whoever is on call, at whatever hour it arrives.

Nurse triage puts a licensed registered nurse on the first call. The nurse assesses the caller against physician-authored protocols, reaches a disposition, documents the encounter, and escalates to your on-call clinician only when the protocol calls for it. The clinical difference is the disposition. The operational difference is how many times your staff gets woken up.

A licensed registered nurse owns every disposition. If we ever put a clerical front door in front of the queue to collect a name and a callback number, it is clerical only: it does not assess, it does not advise, and it does not decide. No automated system and no non-clinical operator triages a TULQ call.

Schmitt-Thompson, the physician-authored protocol framework used by the large majority of medical call centers in the United States. Your medical director reviews and signs off on the protocol set before we take a call, and can adjust dispositions where your practice has a standing preference.

Every call produces a dated encounter note: who called, what was assessed, which protocol was used, the disposition reached, the advice given, and any escalation. Where you can grant delegated access we document directly in your record under a signed business associate agreement. Where you cannot, the note is returned to you on an agreed schedule with a morning report waiting when you open.

That is the case most vendors handle badly, and it is the one we were built for. A small practice may take four calls a month and still be obligated to have a nurse reachable for all seven hundred and thirty hours of it. Because our nurses cover a pool of practices rather than sitting idle on yours, low volume is priced as low volume instead of as an enterprise contract with a floor you will never reach.

Nursing licensure follows the patient's location, not the nurse's. Our nurses hold multistate licenses under the Nurse Licensure Compact, plus single-state licenses where a state is not a compact member. We confirm coverage for your state before we quote you, and we will tell you if we cannot cover it yet.

No, and you should be sceptical of anyone who says otherwise. Telephone triage calls have no separately payable code in traditional Medicare, so the line is a practice expense, not a revenue line. It is worth paying for because it satisfies a requirement you already carry, it keeps your providers asleep, and every avoided emergency visit protects your shared savings. Care management, which does pay, is the revenue line: that is covered here.