A Distance Integrated Triage System for Crowded Health Centers

Abstract

Due to overcrowding in hospital waiting rooms, queue abandonment by frustrated patients remains a great problem. In the out-patient department, patients are normally served on a first-come-first-serve policy. Since there exists a distance decay association, whereby patients living further away from healthcare facilities experience worse health outcomes, it is these patients that are likely to return home without medical assistance. In the developing world, health facilities are few and scattered such that patients walk long distance to reach to the nearest health center. Triage can play an important role to ensure that such patients have a better chance to access medical care. Unfortunately, all the existing triage systems do not consider patient distance. In this paper, we propose a distance integrated triage system. We propose using patient distance as a queue shuffling variable. The patient’s vitals are captured by a kit of bio-sensors. This is unlike the existing triage systems that are associated with mis-triage due to lack of discriminator use or numerical miscalculations. Our work is based on the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital triage system which is based on the Cape Triage System.