Classification of emergency department chief complaints into 7 syndromes: A retrospective analysis of 527,228 patients

Abstract

Study objective: Electronic surveillance systems often monitor triage chief complaints in hopes of detecting an outbreak earlier than can be accomplished with traditional reporting methods. We measured the accuracy of a Bayesian chief complaint classifier called CoCo that assigns patients 1 of 7 syndromic categories (respiratory, botulinic, gastrointestinal, neurologic, rash, constitutional, or hemorrhagic) based on free-text triage chief complaints. Methods: We compared CoCo's classifications with criterion syndromic classification based on International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) discharge diagnoses. We assigned the criterion classification to a patient based on whe..