Virtual Triage Early Detection of Inappropriate Care-Seeking Intent Among Patients with Life-Threatening Cardiac Symptoms

Abstract

Reports indicate that only 19% of patients with prodromal symptoms of sudden cardiac arrest seek the appropriate level of care acuity, which may be due partly to individuals being unable to distinguish which acute symptoms require urgent care. This study evaluated the degree to which patient-users of artificial intelligence-based virtual triage presenting with prodromal symptoms of a possibly life-threatening cardiac condition intended to seek the needed emergency care. A dataset of 746,282 virtual triage patient-users was examined to assess the characteristics of those reporting symptoms of potentially life-threatening cardiac conditions with no intention to seek emergency care. Of 3,968 patient-users over age 35 with severe cardiac symptoms, 89.4% did not plan to seek emergency care. A majority of patient-users did not appear to understand the level of care acuity to seek, or planned to engage self-care or to visit an outpatient physician, instead of seeking emergency care. These findings reinforce the need for much-improved patient education among patients at risk for potentially life-threatening cardiac symptoms which require urgent medical care. Virtual triage (or symptom checkers) with care referral may have value in patient engagement and education to achieve this objective.

Received: 31 May 2024 | Revised: 23 July 2024 | Accepted: 6 August 2024

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support this work are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Author Contribution Statement

George A. Gellert: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Mateusz Palczewski: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Maria Marecka: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Katarzyna Paczkowska: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Aleksandra Suwinska: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Jakub Jaszczak: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Gabriel L. Gellert: Data curation, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Piotr M. Orzechowski: Supervision. Tim Price: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Stanislaw Gorski: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision.