Tele-triage of Child with Abdominal Pain Using the Internet-based Decision Support System

The paper describes an Internet-based decision support system that will help emergency room (ER) medical personnel in triage of children with an abdominal pain. The system will be suited for admission management procedures typical for Canadian and Polish pediatric hospitals. At present a child complaining of an abdominal pain is initially triaged in ER as: appendicitis (requiring surgical consult), other (not yet determined pathological problem), and resolution (harmless pain caused by nonpathological problems). This triage indicates how to take care of a patient. Children classified as ‘appendicitis’ are immediately referred to surgeon, those with ‘other’ triage stay in the emergency room or in a hospital and undergo further consultations, and the others, diagnosed as ‘resolution’, are released home. Main objectives of developing and introducing the system are: support of triage accuracy by the emergency room staff, and reducing management costs. The computer system will be built using clientserver architecture. Server, accessible over the Internet, will be responsible for storing records of diagnosed patients in the database, analyzing stored data with the use of AI and machine learning techniques, and for supporting triage of new patients. Client, running in web browser, will be used for entering data and presenting suggested triage. Apart of the Internet-based system, a mobile version, running on the PDA devices will be also developed. 1 Triage of child with abdominal pain