Can AI Be Used to Triage ED Patients?

“Imagine two patients who need to be transported to the hospital but there is only one ambulance, or a physician is on call and there are three people paging her at the same time, and she has to determine who to respond to first,” Christopher Williams, MB, BCHir, a UCSF postdoctoral scholar at the Baker Institute and lead author of the study, said in a UCSF press release.

The ESI “uses an algorithm to categorize patients arriving at the ED, estimating the severity of their condition and anticipated future resource use,” Williams and his colleagues said in the study. “The ESI is assigned based on a combination of initial vital sign assessments, the patient’s presenting symptoms, and the clinical judgment of the triage clinician, who is often a trained registered nurse. By capturing clinical acuity at triage, the ESI can be used as a surrogate marker to evaluate, at scale, whether LLMs can correctly assess the severity of a patient’s condition on presentation to the ED. This can be achieved by providing the LLM with patient clinical histories documented in ED physician notes, prompting the model to compare histories to determine which patient has the higher acuity, and evaluating the model output against the ground truth as determined by ESI score.”

While proving the value of the AI tool, Williams pointed out that the technology shouldn’t be introduced to an ED just yet. An incorrect assessment could cause delays in treatment that could harm the patient or even lead to death. In addition, AI tools could reflect biases caused by the data used to train the model, further expanding care gaps for underserved populations.