Artificial Intelligence Triage of Patients Requiring Emergency or Unscheduled Care Who Need to be Referred to Hospital

For several decades, hospital emergency departments have been experiencing congestion, sometimes reaching saturation point, where they are no longer able to fulfil their primary mission: to prioritise patients requiring immediate care due to a clinical situation that could be life-threatening or functionally debilitating. The main reason for this situation is a structural mismatch between medical needs, which have increased due to population ageing, and outpatient care supply, which has remained relatively stable in order to contain healthcare expenditure. As a result, a large proportion of people visiting hospital emergency departments are individuals who have been unable to find a solution to their medical needs in the community and have turned to the hospital as a last resort. These are patients seeking urgent, unscheduled care who have been unable to obtain an appointment with their general practitioner or another primary care professional. In times of extreme pressure, as sometimes happens in France during the summer, access to hospital emergency departments is limited to patients who have received prior authorisation to attend. Similarly, new ways of managing these requests for urgent or unscheduled care are being sought in the field of medical regulation. Triage of patients by telephone appears to be an essential step in medical regulation prior to access to hospital emergency departments. Indeed, if solutions are available in the city for patients who do not need to go to the emergency department, this triage will optimise the resources of the healthcare system. However, quickly assessing patients without visual contact (who may be in a state of emotional distress or face a language barrier) is a particularly delicate task. Several triage algorithms are available to assist telephone operators. However, these require structured clinical information that is not easily and quickly accessible during calls. For several years now, artificial intelligence (AI)