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

Abstract Background: Pre-hospital process is important criteria which helps patients in term of treatment performance before admitting to Emergency Department (ED) or requesting from an emergency unit. The existing system to triage patients in Thailand is not practically functioning in the primary medical or pre-hospital treatment in term of speeding, feature, or appropriate system. There is a high possibility for misrepresenting false Initial Dispatch Code (IDC), which causes the requirement of over or under emergency resources, such as rescuers and teams, community hospitals and emergency medical volunteers. Methods: In the development, usability system design has been applied to gather with system reliability test, to support the pre-hospital processes especially to sort patients by using IDC for requesting emergency resources. The development of triage mobile application has been conducted on both iOS and Android operating systems for supporting triage patient habits based on the CBD protocol. The 25 main symptom categories covered by CBD were used to design and develop the application, and 12 emergency medical staffs including doctors and nurses are subjected to test the system in the following aspects: triage protocol correction, triage reliability, usability and users’ practical satisfaction. Results: The development result shows the comparison between the proposed triage application and staff experience. Triage reliability test implies that the time used to triage by experienced staffs, in many cases, is slower than using the application. For the usability test, the result shows that the application functions are more effective in terms of the increment of emergency operations and correction of IDC code represented. Conclusions: The triage application will be utilized to support the pre-hospital process and to classify patient habits before admitting patients to ED. The application can be suitable for user who are not medical emergency staff. Patients with non-trauma symptoms may be a suitable group to use the application in term of time used to identify IDC for their own symptoms. In term of using the application, it can possibly provide benefits to general people who want to self-identify their symptoms before requesting medical services.