Triage Practices and How They’re Evolving

Patient triage is a practice that's essential to delivering effective, responsive care. Learn how the practice is evolving as a result of telehealth tech, pandemic developments, and more.

In cases of overcrowding in hospitals, some very difficult decisions need to be made in regards to patient priority and the division of resources used to treat said patients. Fortunately, when staff is stretched thin, when patients are flooding the ER, and when these incredibly challenging decisions need to be made, triage, the process of organizing and prioritizing patients based on who needs care most urgently, comes into play.

The Triage Categories

A couple of systems exist for categorizing patients in scenarios where triage is necessary.

START (Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment) is one such system that’s optimized for quick admittance and simplifies the triage process for those who haven’t received specialized training. START breaks patients into 4 general categories.

- Those whose odds of survival will not change even if they receive care.

- Those who can be helped but only through immediate intervention.

- Those who are injured but can afford to have their care delayed.

- Those who do not require urgent care.

The START system is popular because these categories are rather general and patients can easily be categorized into them through minor questioning.

In more severe cases of mass injury, there’s also a more advanced method of triage that involves 5 categories, all identified by color-coded tags.

- Red: Patients who cannot survive without immediate care.

- Yellow: Those who require care but are currently stable. These patients might require re-triaging.-

- Green: Those who need care, but can afford to wait.

- White: Those with minor injuries who can be dismissed.

- Black: Those who are deceased or won’t survive with the care available at the facility.

This system requires much more deliberation and more trained personnel in order to categorize patients, specifically due to the distinction between red and yellow tags. Since mis-categorization between these two tags can lead to death, this method of triage takes careful training and specialized staff.

Methods of Triaging

RFID-Based Triage

With triage, timing is key, especially if you’re dealing with a red tag patient. Understanding this, RFID badges have become a popular solution to quickly assessing a patient’s level of risk and moving them through care.

By giving a patient an RFID bracelet and scanning them into a system with an RFID equipped medical tablet, physicians can quickly input symptoms and risk levels, updating their colleagues in real time in regards to the state of their waiting room.

In cases where a patient’s risk level changes. For example, if a yellow tag patient is put into the system, as soon as they pass the threshold into needing immediate care, everyone can be notified and jump into action at a moment’s notice.

Teletriage

Jefferson Health recently undertook teletriage practices in full force when they noticed the COVID-19 outbreak pick up speed. By speaking with patients over video chats, they were able to quickly take down any symptoms the patient was feeling and give them an educated opinion on whether or not they should come in for a closer look.

According to the team, they saw noticeable decreases in the amount of time spent during each triage, making it possible to speak to exponentially more patients.

Self-Triage Using Chatbots

Self-triage, or triage done by patients using different tools and educational resources such as chatbots, has jumped up in popularity as well.

Several use cases documenting instances where chatbots have been retooled and reconfigured with information regarding COVID19 symptoms have already come out. Being trained on this new information, chatbots such as Providence Health’s “Grace” are able to field questions from patients about symptoms and determine whether they should quarantine or come in for treatment.

Triage is About Preparing for Storm

Today’s developments have taught us that preparation for the days where triage is necessary can save time, resources and, lives. For more information on triage and the tech needed to put it into practice, contact an expert from Cybernet today.