Prioritizing Emergency Care and Improving Patient Safety Through Technology

The overuse of emergency services for non-urgent situations poses a major daily challenge to hospitals and health facilities. These resources should be  reserved for the treatment of truly serious patients, who require the highest quality and safety.

What Is Urgent Is Not Always Severe, and What Is Severe Is Not Always Urgent

There are patients who may suffer complications that may even endanger their lives if they are not treated quickly, while others can wait to be treated without compromising their health conditions. Given this scenario, the emergency services have sought objective tools that allow them to measure, evaluate and prioritize care, reducing the clinical risk for the severe patient.

Clinical Risk Management and Patient Safety in Emergency Departments

To find out how emergency departments manage patient care, we spoke to Juan Rubio Gallego, Supervisor of the Emergency Department at the Infanta Leonor University Hospital, and member of the Spanish Manchester Triage Group in the Community of Madrid.

NTTDATA: What system is currently being used to prioritize care and decrease the risk in emergency services?

Juan Rubio Gallego: Triage is the clinical risk management system used  emergency departments to safely manage the excessive flow of patients when their capacity is exceeded. It consists of an assessment carried out by health professionals (doctors and nurses) that classifies patients in a regulated, valid and reproducible way, ensuring that those patients in need of critical attention will be treated immediately, while the remaining patients will sorted into different classifications. depending on their care needs.

NTTDATA: What triage system is currently being used in the hospital network in the Community of Madrid?

Juan Rubio Gallego: In the Community of Madrid, the Hospital Emergency Departments are adopting the Manchester Triage System (MTS), a method that offers many advantages. To illustrate its use with figures, we could mention that 2,939,199 patients were treated in the year 2014 in the emergency departments, 88% of whom were classified with the Manchester Triage System (MTS).

NTTDATA:  And what does this patient classification system consist of?

Juan Rubio Gallego: The Manchester Triage is based on a method that is easy to learn, apply and execute that enables the classification of patients according to their level of severity, in under one minute.

In summary, the MTS quickly and easily assesses the level of severity of the patients, prioritizing the order of treatment and assigning a waiting time, determining the care circuits according to the level of severity and avoiding the variability of the observer at each priority level. The system achieves a high predicted severity value – Juan Rubio Gallego

The Five Wait Times in the Manchester Triage System

The Manchester Triage System assigns patients a priority level based on their complaint and their answers to a set of standardized and hierarchical questions.

To manage this care, the Manchester Triage assigns five maximum wait times ranging from immediate care for critical states, to 240 minutes for non-urgent states, according to the classification of the patient’s condition.

Prioritizing and Attending in the ER with the Help of Technology

The use of algorithms and computer systems in the emergency rooms is a great help to health professionals to prioritize and attend to patients with greater speed and accuracy.

ehCOS Triage is the only patient prioritization software certified  by the Spanish Triage group for version three of the Manchester Triage (MTS) structured clinical algorithm.

The ehCOS Manchester Triage v3 system makes it easy for nurses and doctors to configure the patient care flows for each Emergency Department.