OBJECTIVE To compare the workloads of general practitioners and nurses and costs of patient care for nurse telephone triage and standard management of requests for same day appointments in routine primary care. DESIGN Multiple interrupted time series using sequential introduction of experimental triage system in different sites with repeated measures taken one week in every month for 12 month...

BACKGROUND Due to emergency care overcrowding, right care at the right place and time is necessary. Uniform triage of patients contacting different emergency care settings will improve quality of care and communication between health care providers. OBJECTIVE Validation of the computer-based Netherlands Triage System (NTS) developed for physical triage at emergency departments (EDs) and telep...

BACKGROUND The Canadian Emergency Department Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) is a well recognized and validated triage system that prioritizes patient care by severity of illness. The aim of this study was to describe the results of Emergency Department (ED) waiting times after the implementation of the CTAS in a major tertiary care hospital emergency department outside of Canada. METHODS A to...

BACKGROUND Emergency departments across the globe follow a triage system in order to cope with overcrowding. The intention behind triage is to improve the emergency care and to prioritize cases in terms of clinical urgency. DISCUSSION In emergency department triage, medical care might lead to adverse consequences like delay in providing care, compromise in privacy and confidentiality, poor ph...

OBJECTIVES Triage processes are often used by Emergency Departments to sort patients according to urgency or type of service required. Triage may also be used in a broad spectrum of other health services and not just emergency departments. Triage systems may be used to ensure the most urgent patients get timely service, but do they have an effect on patient flow? METHODS We conducted a system...

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 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 ...