ViroGates A/S : ED triage at Sismanoglio General Hospital

The Sismanoglio General Hospital is a third level institution with a 540-bed capacity. The hospital employs specialised medical personnel covering medical fields such as pathology, chronic pulmonary diseases, tuberculosis, surgical chest cases, and vascular issues, except for trauma cases.

When arriving at the ED (Fig. 2), patients enter through the established ED triage ambulatory (Fig. 3). Here, all patients are examined, and the severity of the disease evaluated. The hospital is open for new patients every third day from 8 am to 3 pm and every fourth day for a full 24-hour day, where 300-500 patients enter the ED . Each year, approx 40.500 patients are examined. Approx 9.000 of these are admitted.
To handle the high number of tests needed to be analysed each day, the central laboratory is well equipped with an automated high-throughput platform following the ISO standardisation. In total, nearly 500 orders are processed daily, corresponding to almost 5.000 tests. Most of the admitted patients are elderly patients with comorbidities related to internal medicine, pulmonary or cardiological issues like COPD, asthma, diabetes mellitus, CRA, heart failure, ischemic heart disease, and hypertension. These high numbers of patients are a huge burden for the medical staff, with many problems to be resolved each day.