Triage is shaping your staffing, responsiveness, and operating costs.
Are you measuring it?
Triage is a critical operational decision point: its design shapes how quickly staff assess patient needs, when they deploy scarce nursing capacity, and whether follow-up is visible, coordinated, and completed.
The State of Post-Acute Triage gives leaders a practical benchmark for understanding how demand moves through the operation and where the current model may be creating unnecessary pressure.
VOLUME 1 | JULY 2025–JUNE 2026
Benchmark at a glance.
>912,000
48 - 87%
9.2x
"Triage is a control layer that converts uncertainty into a decision: a disposition, a handoff, a visit, a medication action, a documented next step. Every one of those decisions reallocates organizational and clinical capacity. Getting it wrong doesn’t fail quietly.”
BEFORE YOU ASK
What will you learn from the report?
Understand what is reaching the on-call nurse.
The report distinguishes between encounters that avoided on-call notification and those that escalated to the on-call nurse.
That distinction is more useful than call volume alone because it shows how triage is affecting clinical capacity.
The difference between home health and hospice benchmarks.
Home health and hospice serve different populations, operate under different clinical conditions, and generate different demand patterns.
The report compares both service lines across after-hours and business-hours operations so leaders can benchmark against a more relevant peer group, rather than a blended average.
Find the variation hidden inside the average.
The benchmark shows why averages need context. In home health business hours, average calls per patient per week were approximately five times higher than the median.
That gap suggests outliers are influencing the average. The right leadership response is to identify the programs, locations, or time periods driving the difference, and understand why.
Use repeat calling as an early signal.
Hospice’s average after-hours repeat-caller percentage was 30.8%, compared with 17.1% for home health.
The difference may reflect appropriate high-touch care. It may also point to unclear next steps, unresolved coordination work, delayed equipment or medication, or communication gaps.
The report gives leaders a starting point for asking what is behind recurring contact.
Do we lose visibility into what happens overnight?
The opposite is the usual outcome. Most agencies running on-call rotations have no structured record of after-hours activity at all. You get documented dispositions, answer times, resolution rates, and escalation patterns — for the first time in many cases.
Built for leaders who need to know what triage is doing to the rest of the organization.
The report is based on a defined subset of eligible operating data from July 2025 through June 2026. It is intended to provide a practical reference point for home health and hospice leaders.