Triage
Hospital Operations
Definition. Triage is the process of sorting patients by the urgency of their need for care so that limited resources are used for those who need them most.
Explanation
The concept comes from military medicine and is now used in emergency departments, disasters, telephone advice and primary care. Iserson and Moskop (2007) distinguish triage types by setting and by the principle used to allocate resources.
Emergency departments use structured five-level scales such as the Emergency Severity Index, the Manchester Triage System and the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale. Under-triage delays care for seriously ill patients and over-triage uses scarce resources, so reliability and accuracy of the scale are monitored as quality indicators.
Related concepts
Patient flow Waiting time Emergency department crowding Bottleneck
Read on The Health Topics
- Factors Driving 30-Day ED Revisits in Older Patients
- Lean Transformation in a Public Hospital Emergency Department
- Forecasting Methods in Health Management: Taxonomy, Methodological Evolution, Models, Metrics and an Evidence Gap Map
- Transforming Electronic Health Records into Predictive Tools
- An Old Mind, a New Health System: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology for Health Management
- The Capacity Problem in Oncology and How to Solve It
References
Gilboy, N., Tanabe, P., Travers, D., & Rosenau, A. M. (2011). Emergency Severity Index (ESI): A triage tool for emergency department care, version 4. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Iserson, K. V., & Moskop, J. C. (2007). Triage in medicine, part I: Concept, history, and types. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 49(3), 275–281.
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Triage. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/triage/
Articles that discuss this concept
27 articles on The Health Topics use this concept; the 12 that use it most are listed. The list updates as new articles are published.
- Factors Driving 30-Day ED Revisits in Older Patients 6
- Lean Transformation in a Public Hospital Emergency Department 5
- Forecasting Methods in Health Management: Taxonomy, Methodological Evolution, Models, Metrics and an Evidence Gap Map 5
- Transforming Electronic Health Records into Predictive Tools 4
- ChatGPT in Medicine: Benefits, Limits, and Risks 2
- Developing an eClinic for Youth Mental Health: A Participatory Design Approach 2
- Hospitalist Handoffs And 30-Day Mortality: What A Million Medicare Admissions Tell Us 2
- Navigating LLMs in Healthcare: Pitfalls and Potentials 2
- AI and Medical Liability: A New Methodology 2
- When AI Speaks Down to Patients 2
- The Capacity Problem in Oncology and How to Solve It 2
- An Old Mind, a New Health System: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology for Health Management 2