Triage

Triage is the process of deciding how urgently each patient must be seen, so that the patient in most danger is treated first, rather than the patient who arrived first. The word comes from the French word for "to sort". Every hospital emergency department does triage at its door. It is now also done on phone calls, scans and ECGs, and more and more often an AI model does the first sort.

Here is how triage works in general. Patients or cases arrive in no particular order. Each one gets a quick check: a few questions, a few readings such as pulse and oxygen level, or a first look at a scan. This check is not a diagnosis. It only places the case in an urgency level. Many emergency departments use colours: red for treat now, yellow for treat soon and green for can wait. The waiting list is then reordered by those levels. A waiting patient can get worse, so the cases still waiting are checked again after some time.

Why use software for this? A hospital may receive hundreds of calls, scans or ECGs a day, and it has too few specialists to look at each one at once. A model can do the first sort in seconds, at any hour. A doctor or nurse still decides on the treatment.

Take, for example, a patient who phones a clinic about chest pain and breathlessness. In AI nurse triage, a voice agent asks set questions about the symptoms. It then passes the call straight to a nurse instead of booking a routine appointment.

Consider a radiologist with 200 chest X-rays waiting to be read. AI radiology reads each one first. It moves the X-rays that show a likely tuberculosis or a collapsed lung to the top of the list, so the radiologist reads those first.

For instance, a clinic with no heart specialist records an ECG and sends it for remote ECG interpretation. An ECG that shows a possible heart attack is read by a cardiologist within minutes, ahead of the normal ones.

How is triage different from diagnosis? A diagnosis decides what the illness is. Triage decides only how soon someone must look at the patient, and a nurse or a model can do it without making the diagnosis. The same idea is used outside medicine. In a security team, alert triage sorts thousands of alerts into the few that need a person now. An IT service desk ranks tickets by how many employees each problem affects.