If the goal is to predict patient outcomes, yes. But is that the right question?
Triage is an ingrained tradition in emergency medicine. Instead of caring for patients under physicians' guidance, experienced nurses are deployed independently to the “front end” to interview patients and sort them into acuity categories, with the goal of sending patients who aren't too sick to a waiting room. These investigators used machine-learning techniques to perform this sorting function, and they report on the algorithms' accuracy.
Using data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) from 2007 through 2015, the investigators developed algorithms to predict hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, or death for about 50,000 children. For comparison, the NHAMCS database contains a five-level triage…
Reviewing Author
DisclosuresConsultant/Advisory BoardPortola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Speaker’s BureauPeerView Institute for Medical Education
Grant/Research SupportAgency for Healthcare Research and Quality; CDC; NIH–National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; NIH–National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); NIH–NIAID–Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group; Merck; Pfizer; Boehringer-Ingelheim; Shire; Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Novartis; bioMérieux; Siemens; Rapid Pathogen Screening; Magnolia; Stago; Innovative Biosensors; Molecular Detection, Inc.; Dyax Corp.; Trius Pharmaceuticals
DisclosuresConsultant/Advisory BoardPortola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Speaker’s BureauPeerView Institute for Medical Education
Grant/Research SupportAgency for Healthcare Research and Quality; CDC; NIH–National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; NIH–National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); NIH–NIAID–Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group; Merck; Pfizer; Boehringer-Ingelheim; Shire; Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Novartis; bioMérieux; Siemens; Rapid Pathogen Screening; Magnolia; Stago; Innovative Biosensors; Molecular Detection, Inc.; Dyax Corp.; Trius Pharmaceuticals