A Novel Deep Learning–Based System for Triage in the Emergency Department Using Electronic Medical Records: Retrospective Cohort Study

Background Emergency department (ED) crowding has resulted in delayed patient treatment and has become a universal health care problem. Although a triage system, such as the 5-level emergency severity index, somewhat improves the process of ED treatment, it still heavily relies on the nurse’s subjective judgment and triages too many patients to emergency severity index level 3 in current practice. Hence, a system that can help clinicians accurately triage a patient’s condition is imperative. Objective This study aims to develop a deep learning–based triage system using patients’ ED electronic medical records to predict clinical outcomes after ED treatments. Methods We conducted a retrospective study using data from an open data set from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey from 2012 to 2016 and data from a local data set from the National Taiwan University Hospital from 2009 to 2015. In this study, we transformed structured data into text form and used convolutional neural networks combined with recurrent neural networks and attention mechanisms to accomplish the classification task. We evaluated our performance using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). Results A total of 118,602 patients from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey were included in this study for predicting hospitalization, and the accuracy and AUROC were 0.83 and 0.87, respectively. On the other hand, an external experiment was to use our own data set from the National Taiwan University Hospital that included 745,441 patients, where the accuracy and AUROC were similar, that is, 0.83 and 0.88, respectively. Moreover, to effectively evaluate the prediction quality of our proposed system, we also applied the model to other clinical outcomes, including mortality and admission to the intensive care unit, and the results showed that our proposed method was approximately 3% to 5% higher in accuracy than other conventional methods. Conclusions Our proposed method achieved better performance than the traditional method, and its implementation is relatively easy, it includes commonly used variables, and it is better suited for real-world clinical settings. It is our future work to validate our novel deep learning–based triage algorithm with prospective clinical trials, and we hope to use it to guide resource allocation in a busy ED once the validation succeeds.