Thailand Medical Mobile Application for Patients Triage Base on Criteria Based Dispatch Protocol

Abstract Background : Before admitting patients into the emergency department, the pre-hospital process is important both in terms of treatment performance and requesting resources from an emergency unit. The existing system to triage patients in Thailand is not functioning optimally in either the primary medical system or pre-hospital treatment. Areas that contain shortcomings include speed, features, and appropriate systems. There is a high possibility of misrepresenting false Initial Dispatch Code (IDC) which causes over or under utilizing emergency resources, such as rescue teams, community hospitals and emergency medical volunteers. Methods : In the application development, usability system design has been applied together with system reliability test, to optimize the pre-hospital processes specifically to sort patients by using IDC improving request for emergency resources. The development of a triage mobile application has been conducted on both iOS and Android operating systems to support patient triage based on the Criteria Based Dispatch (CBD). The 25 main symptom categories covered by CBD were used to design and develop the application, and 12 emergency medical staff including doctors and nurses were subjected to test the system in the following aspects: triage protocol correction, triage reliability, usability and user satisfaction. Results : The application development result shows the comparison between the proposed triage application and staff experience. The triage reliability test implies that the time used to triage by experienced staff, in non-trauma cases, is slower than using the application. For the usability test, the result shows that the application functions are more effective in the emergency operations and correction of IDC code representation. Conclusions : The triage application will be utilized to support the pre-hospital process and to classify patient conditions before admitting patients to the Emergency Department (ED). The application is suitable for users who are not medical emergency staff. Patients with non-trauma symptoms may be a suitable group to use the application in terms of time used to identify IDC for their own symptoms. In terms of application use, it can provide benefits to those who want to self-identify their symptoms before requesting medical services.