The Joint Commission journal on quality improvement
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Jt Comm J Qual Improv · Feb 2000
Comparative StudyDoes this patient need to be evaluated today? Designing a guideline-driven triage process to determine the timing of care for adults with respiratory infection symptoms.
Physicians and nurses often make judgments about the urgency with which patients require evaluation, yet few explicit process-of-care criteria are available to guide these decisions. Using a multidisciplinary expert physician panel and explicit, quantitative group judgment methods, standardized, clinically detailed deferred care criteria were developed to guide emergency department and ambulatory care triage decisions for same-day versus deferred care for patients with respiratory infection symptoms. ⋯ Application of explicit criteria for deferring care of patients with respiratory infection symptoms did not lengthen triage time. This approach may facilitate more efficient resource management for ambulatory settings. However, widespread use before these criteria's, our systematic criteria-based triage should be validated in multicenter clinical trials against an outcome standard and the more common implicit approach.