OBJECTIVE Virtually all emergency department (ED) patients receive an ED triage assessment that determines their priority to be seen by a physician. Previous research found that half of patients who are having an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) are given a low priority triage score, which is associated with delays in electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition and reperfusion therapy. We sought to de...

1 Work done while at Microsoft Research. ABSTRACT Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by first presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs for email triage. We then use thes...

BACKGROUND Worldwide the demands on emergency and primary health care services are increasing. General practitioners and accident and emergency departments are often used unnecessarily for the treatment of minor ailments. Community pharmacy is often the first port of call for patients in the provision of advice on minor ailments, advising the patient on treatment or referring the patient to an ...

BACKGROUND High costs are a limitation to scaling up the Xpert MTB/RIF assay (Xpert) for the diagnosis of tuberculosis in resource-constrained settings. A triaging strategy in which a sensitive but not necessarily highly specific rapid test is used to select patients for Xpert may result in a more affordable diagnostic algorithm. To inform the selection and development of particular diagnostics...

The need for effective triage of the increasing number of patients presenting for emergency care was recognized in the early 1990s. Dr. Robert Beveridge led the development of a Canadian triage scale based on work done in Australia to create the Australasian National Triage Scale. The original Canadian Emergency Department Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) was an adult-centred classification that ...

BACKGROUND Telephone consultation and triage are used to limit the workload on emergency departments. Lack of visual cues and clinical tests put telephone consultations to a disadvantage compared to face-to-face consultations increasing the risk of under-triage. Under-triage occurs in telephone triage; however why under-triage happens is not explored yet. The aim of the study was to describe si...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The mass casualty triage system known as simple triage and rapid treatment (START) has been widely used in the United States since the 1980s. However, no outcomes assessment has been conducted after a disaster to determine whether assigned triage levels match patients' actual clinical status. Researchers hypothesize that START achieves at least 90% sensitivity and specificity fo...

BACKGROUND Telephone triage is an increasingly common means of handling requests for same-day appointments in general practice. AIM To determine whether telephone triage (GP-led or nurse-led) reduces clinician-patient contact time on the day of the request (the index day), compared with usual care. DESIGN AND SETTING A total of 42 practices in England recruited to the ESTEEM trial. METHOD...

OBJECTIVE To assess the performance of the newly implemented Canadian Emergency Department Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) triage system in a redesigned 200-bed community hospital emergency department (ED) and to evaluate the predictive validity of CTAS in this setting. METHODS Triage system performance was analyzed on the basis of 4 quality indicators: time to triage; triage duration; proport...

OBJECTIVE To determine the diagnostic and triage accuracy of online symptom checkers (tools that use computer algorithms to help patients with self diagnosis or self triage). DESIGN Audit study. SETTING Publicly available, free symptom checkers. PARTICIPANTS 23 symptom checkers that were in English and provided advice across a range of conditions. 45 standardized patient vignettes were co...