Automated Emergency Room Triage: Helping Patients Get the Best Treatment

We describe an intelligent triage system for emergency rooms; the system interacts with patients and classifies them by priority level and with respect to medical specialty. The system consists of a conversational interface, coupled with sensors and a physical robot-like platform, and classifiers that operate on symptoms and measurements so as to select a medical specialty and to output a priority level. Tests with human subjects demonstrated that our Healthbot system was well received and in fact preferred to alternatives by most people. Tests have also shown that the classifiers reached accuracy consistent with a doctor's output.