Triage

What is Triage?

Triage is an intelligent workflow designed to assess a patient's required level of care. Triage processes a patient’s medical data, such as their risk factors and symptoms, using scientific evidence and the most up-to-date standards of care to provide clear and meaningful information about the patient’s health. Triage can help create a more accountable and accessible health system by offering an initial evaluation. The results of the evaluation can range from self-care to a specialist or physician consultation to urgent emergencies that require an ambulance. At the end of each survey, patients are guided and equipped with basic knowledge about their most probable conditions, regardless of the evaluated triage level.

Possible triage levels include:

• self care
• consultation
• consultation within 24h
• emergency
• emergency ambulance

Key steps described within this workflow (survey):

1. User creation
2. Patient creation
3. Survey creation
   a. Demographics
   b. Risk factors
   c. Initial symptoms
   d. Symptoms assessment
4. Next steps

How to create a Triage workflow

To create a Triage workflow with Platform API, we need to start by creating a user and a patient, which are the fundamental entities necessary to link a survey to a specific user/patient.

Steps to creating a Triage survey:

1. Creating a user

A user represents an individual who interacts with the Infermedica platform.

Example request:

curl "https://api.infermedica.com/api/mgp/v1/users" \
  -X "POST" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" \
  -d '{
  "email": "user@example.net",
  "phone": "+498999998999"
}'

Available attributes:

• email - user email
• phone - user phone number

More information on creating a user can be found here.

2. Creating a patient

A patient is an entity representing a person's medical information within the Infermedica system. Each Triage survey is linked to a patient. The data provided during patient creation directly affects the questions that appear in the survey.

Example request:

curl "https://api.infermedica.com/api/mgp/v1/patients" \
  -X "POST" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" \
  -d '{
  "sex": "male",
  "age": {
	"unit": "year",
	"value": 20
  },
  "evidence": [
	{
  	"id": "s_98",
  	"choice_id": "present",
  	"source": "initial"
	}
  ],
  "dependent": true,
  "user_id": "c599e21b-3795-4f02-a14e-b46884f8a0c9"
}'

Available attributes:

• dependent - is patient dependent on the user. The value true means that the survey created for this patient is completed by another person, like a parent or caregiver. For underage patients, dependent must be set to true - if provided initially, the question about dependent will be omitted
• sex - patient sex - if provided initially, a separate question about sex will be omitted
• age - patient age - if provided initially, a separate question about age will be omitted
• evidence - patient initial symptoms - If at least one initial symptom is provided, the patient won't be asked about providing initial symptoms in the survey. However, patients will be asked about when those symptoms appeared. This can reduce the number of questions about symptoms that the patient will be asked about later on in the survey
• user_id (required) - related user ID

More information on creating a patient can be found here.

3. Creating a survey

A survey is the interview process in which medical information about a patient is collected.

Example request:

curl "https://api.infermedica.com/api/mgp/v1/surveys" \
  -X "POST" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" \
  -d '{
  "sections": [
    "intent_survey",
    "risk_factors",
    "dynamic"
  ],
  "type": "triage",
  "patient_id": "9702c05b-5871-4109-ae2a-82f8c9dad64c"
}'

Available attributes:

• sections - Survey question sections that will be displayed during the interview. If no data is provided, all sections will be visible. If data is provided, the interview will include only the specified sections along with mandatory questions such as sex, age, and dependents (if not provided during patient creation). The assignment of questions to specific sections is specified in the table below.
• type (required) - survey type - triage
• patient_id (required) - related patient ID

More information on creating a survey can be found here.

Demographics

Basic questions that are the same for all patients. Demographic information is important to starting an interview and adapting questions to the appropriate age and sex groups.

• Dependent
• Sex
• Age
• Risk factors

Symptoms assessment

This is the dynamic interview that is supported with AI-driven question generation. It starts by collecting the evidence. AI-based algorithms then analyze similar symptoms in Infermedica’s Medical Knowledge Base and check the interactions between them.

• Symptoms
• Related symptoms
• Evidence - answers to AI-generated questions during dynamic interview

Summary of all of the questions within the Triage survey:

4. Next steps

This workflow is designed to support patients in deciding what kind of care they need. Evidence assessment can be used to calculate the most probable conditions. The data collected can be integrated with other systems, like patient accounts or doctor panels. Integration of data can differ depending on the solutions used at a given company and should be developed client-side.