Development of a decision algorithm to support emergency triage of scrotal pain and its implementation in the mobile emergency triage system

The acute scrotum is a clinical condition in boys and adolescent males that is normally first assessed in the Emergency Department of a hospital. We used data from the patients' charts and applied knowledge discovery technique based on rough set theory to develop a clinical decision algorithm for triaging patients with this condition. As demonstrated by a limited retrospective evaluation, the algorithm supports early triage decisions on the basis of readily available information, resulting in good triage accuracy. In order to make the algorithm usable in clinical practice, to integrate it with the workflow, and to make it available at the point of care, we implemented it as an application in the mobile clinical decision support environment called MET (Mobile Emergency Triage). MET uses ontologies to represent domains of various acute presentations and triage support functionalities, and renders specific applications on demand from these ontologies.