Mobile Emergency Triage: Lessons from a Clinical Trial

The Mobile Emergency Triage system is an m-health decision support system that assists hospital Emergency Department physicians in triaging various acute pain presentations at the point of care. The system is designed following the extended client-server architecture, suited for weak-connectivity conditions. The server interacts with the hospital information system to exchange necessary information, and the client, running on a handheld computer, allows data entry and provides triage support. The support function, consulting decision rules stored in the knowledge base, runs solely on the client side, thus it can be invoked anytime and anywhere. The system recently underwent a successful clinical trial.