Impact of Pain Assessment on Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale Prediction of Patient Outcomes.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: How does the removal of patient-reported pain from the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS) affect the scale's ability to predict admission, ICU consultation, and mortality? METHODS: Retrospective observational cohort study of all adult visits to a tertiary emergency department. The standard CTAS algorithm combined patient-reported pain levels with other data to generate a triage score for each visit. We calculated a "pain-free" CTAS for each visit in the cohort, assuming that the patient had not reported any pain. We fit logistic regression models for each outcome (admission, ICU consultation, and mortality) using either the standard or the pain-free CTAS as the predictor. We compared the area under the receiver operator characteristic curves of the standard versus pain-free CTAS models for each outcome. RESULTS: We analyzed a sample of 229,744 patients. The average reported pain level was 5.6/10 (SD, 3.0) among the 60.1% of the cohort who reported pain. Higher pain was slightly negatively correlated with hospital admission, ICU consultation, and 72-hour mortality (r = -0.008, -0.009, and -0.006, respectively). The area under the curve of the pain-free CTAS was higher than that of the standard scores for hospital admission (0.691 versus 0.641), ICU consultation (0.829 versus 0.773), and mortality (0.863 versus 0.810). Differences were statistically but not clinically significant. CONCLUSION: The removal of the pain scale from CTAS did not reduce its ability to predict hospital admission, ICU consultation, or the 72-hour mortality.

The Effect of Human Supervision on an Electronic Implementation of the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS).

BACKGROUND: Most electronic emergency department (ED) triage systems allow nurses to modify computer-generated triage scores. It is currently unclear how this affects triage validity. OBJECTIVE: Are nurse-generated triage scores more strongly associated with rates of admission, intensive care unit (ICU) consultation, and mortality than computer-generated scores? METHODS: Retrospective observational cohort study of all adult visits to a tertiary ED. An electronic implementation of the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS) generated a CTAS score for each visit. In some cases, the triage nurse overwrote the computer-generated CTAS score with a score they felt was more appropriate. Among visits with nurse-modified triage scores, we compared the rate of acuity-related outcomes (mortality, ICU consultation, hospital admission) in each CTAS level as categorized by nurse-generated vs. computer-generated scores. RESULTS: In a cohort of 229,744 patients, 19,566 (8.51%) had nurse-modified triage scores. Most modifications consisted of assigning a higher acuity triage score than recommended by the computer. Visits with triage scores 1-2 according to the nurse-generated scores had the same or higher rates of the acuity outcomes than visits that were CTAS 1-2 according to the computer-generated CTAS scores. Conversely, visits with triage scores 4-5 according to the nurse-generated scores had lower rates of the outcomes than visits that were CTAS 4-5 according to the computer-generated CTAS scores. CONCLUSIONS: Nursing supervision of the computer-automated CTAS triage system was associated with fewer hospital admissions, ICU consultations, and deaths in the triage score 4-5 categories, suggesting a safer triage process than the automated CTAS algorithm alone.