Trauma Re-Triage

Background

Time and time again, severely injured trauma patients are under-triaged, where patients with severe trauma injuries are taken to non-trauma and low-level trauma centers and are not properly “re-triaged” to higher levels of care. This is known as under-triage, and it is associated with increased mortality as compared to if the patient were taken directly to a high-level trauma center. These patients face a 30% increased mortality at 48 hours and a 3.8x increased odds of overall mortality.

About the Project

ISQIC is looking to change that percentage with its Trauma Re-Triage Program.

The goal of the program is to establish a trauma network across Illinois and to understand why these re-triage failures occur and what interventions are needed to correct them. The program has three aims:

1) To estimate care of timeliness of clinical care at non-trauma and low-level trauma centers;

2) To map the re-triage system and processes of care from non-trauma centers to high-level trauma centers, leveraging a learning collaborative; and

3) To design and pilot-test a user-centered re-triage intervention to improve re-triage for patients.

Since 2020, the team has built process maps highlighting re-triage processes; identified failures based on key feedback from stakeholders; and led stakeholder sessions at non, low, and high-level trauma centers to determine feasible intervention opportunities. These institutions are uniquely positioned to play a key role in saving lives. As a collaborative, we look forward to the opportunity to replicate this process statewide. This includes the sharing of clinical guidelines and operational workflows that will promote and strengthen linkages between sending and receiving centers. This will improve the care coordination for the severely injured trauma patient.

View kick-off meeting

Recent Presentation: We are excited to share that our research team had the privilege of presenting our work at the American College of Surgeons Surgical Conference in February 2024. During this conference, we discussed our findings and insights related to our program. Our presentation highlighted the impact of user-centered design as an under-utilized approach in trauma care.

View Presentation

Attention Chicago Hospital Partners

The Chicago Department of Public Health is offering a limited-time opportunity for Chicago Hospitals to streamline daily bed availability reporting by implementing an Application Programming Interface (API) that links hospital Electronic Medical Records and EMResource.  The goal of this project is to relieve the burden of daily, manual bed availability reporting by hospital staff.

The benefits of implementing this API include:

  • Provided at No Cost
  • Relief of Administrative Burden for Manual Data Entry
  • Enhanced Security (DdoS, Bot Protection, and Malformed API Call Protection)
  • Ensure Timeliness of Data
  • Minimize Human Error and Increase Data Accuracy

An informative handout is available here to share with your technology partners internally.

The deadline is quickly approaching to take advantage of this opportunity.  Please contact Molly Gabaldo (molly.gabaldo@cityofchicago.org) and Meghan Staszak (meghan.staszak@juvare.com) with any interest, questions, or concerns.
Please note that you must contact the project’s coordinators by June 14 to begin the implementation process.