Predicting admission at triage

Some patients spend a long time in the emergency department undergoing assessment to determine whether they should be admitted to hospital or discharged home. This could potentially be avoided if a quick assessment at triage accurately predicted need for admission. Cameron and colleagues used routinely collected data from 215,231 unscheduled adult attendances to derive a score based on triage category, age, National Early Warning Score, arrival by ambulance, referral source and admission within the last year. Validation of the score in a new dataset showed a c-statistic of 0.8774 (95% CI 0.8752 to 0.8796), which means that there is about an 88% probability that a randomly selected admitted patient would have a higher score than a randomly selected discharged patient. The authors highlight that the score requires validation in other settings. This might offer the opportunity to answer another question – does the score perform …