The Effectiveness Of Triage Systems In Prioritizing Patient Care In The Emergency Department

Abstract

Medical institutions have significant challenges, such as the increasing senior population and a shortage of physicians. Telemedicine and remote health monitoring system (RHMS) aim to address these issues by reducing hospital visits to some extent. The use of RHMS alleviates the workload on patients seeking primary care and enhances the exchange of information across various healthcare facilities, hence mitigating the strain on emergency rooms. Multiple healthcare studies have sought to substitute hospital visits with Remote Health Monitoring Systems (RHMS) to provide triage and prioritization for patients due to significant advancements in wireless information transfer and signal-processing technologies. Medical triage is the process of assessing the severity of a patient's condition, while prioritization is done to ensure that healthcare treatments are provided to patients in a timely manner to save their lives. A critical examination is necessary to emphasize the limitations of the existing state of diagnosis and prioritization in a telemedicine setting. This research presents a systematic evaluation of health care emergency triage as well as patient prioritization in a telemedicine setting, focusing on two important aspects. Initially, existing research on triage of patients and prioritization in a similar setting was gathered, examined, and classified. Furthermore, a comprehensive examination of several triage standards and recommendations, as well as various approaches and strategies of prioritization, was conducted. The following outcomes were achieved: (1) The constraints and issues of current patient triage and prioritization strategies were introduced and highlighted. (2) The presentation did not include the process of triage and prioritization of individuals with chronic heart disease. (3) In the future, a framework that combines evidence theory with the incorporation of multilayer hierarchy analysis and approach for ranking choice by resemblance to ideal solution approaches can be employed to categorize chronic cardiac patients into various emergency levels and prioritize them for crisis and treatment-based services.