Question

compare and contrast early point of care testing at triage at emergency department and utility of point of care testing in emergency department triage

Answer 1

Triage :

The assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties.

-Oxford Dictionary

Triage  is the process of determining the priority of patients' treatments based on the severity of their condition.

Emergency departments (EDs) face a number of important challenges in the modern health-care environment. Simultaneously confronted with decreasing hospital resources and growing public demand, EDs frequently experience prolonged waiting times and extended periods of overcrowding. Minimizing the delay between the onset of symptoms and the initiation of therapy is critical to improving outcomes for critically ill patients. Overcrowding forces EDs to operate beyond their capacity and commonly results in delays in diagnosis and treatment, potentially impacting upon patient care.

Comparison:

The introduction early point of care has been shown to improve the speed of access to further investigational interventions.Point-of-care testing (POCT) enables more rapid clinical decision making in the process of diagnosis, (rule-in or rule-out), treatment choice and monitoring, and prognosis, as well as operational decision making and resource utilization. Thus, for all of the above it is possible to consider a role for POCT to help address the pressures on the ED.One intervention to help detect patients who require immediate care is point-of-care testing (POCT) at ED triage. Triage POCT occurs prior to physician evaluation and can aid in identifying clinically important and abnormal test results, reduce the time to detect critical illness, and identify patients safe to wait.It will help the physicians to develop a good and early point of care for the patients admitted in emergency department .

Potential operational benefits include more rapid decision making and triage, reduced operating times, high-dependency, postoperative care time, emergency room time, number of outpatient clinic visits, number of hospital beds required, ensuring optimal use of professional time and reduced of antimicrobial medication.