Defining High-risk Emergency Chief Complaints: Data-driven Triage for Low- and Middle-income Countries.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Emergency medicine in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is hindered by lack of research into patient outcomes. Chief complaints (CCs) are fundamental to emergency care but have only recently been uniquely codified for an LMIC setting in Uganda. It is not known whether CCs independently predict emergency unit patient outcomes.

Methods

Patient data collected in a Ugandan emergency unit between 2009 and 2018 were randomized into validation and derivation data sets. A recursive partitioning algorithm stratified CCs by 3-day mortality risk in each group. The process was repeated in 10,000 bootstrap samples to create an averaged risk ranking. Based on this ranking, CCs were categorized as "high-risk" (>2× baseline mortality), "medium-risk" (between 2 and 0.5× bas

SUBMITTER: Rice B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7818254 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature