Performance of Early Warning Scoring Systems to Detect Patient Deterioration in the Emergency Department.

Acute hospital wards in the UK are required to use Early Warning Scoring EWS systems to monitor patients' vital-signs. These are often paper-based, and involve the use of heuristics to score the vital signs which are measured every 2-4 hours by nursing staff. If these scores exceed pre-defined thresholds, the patient is deemed to be at risk of deterioration. In this paper we compare the performance of EWS systems, that use different approaches to score abnormal vital-signs, to identify acutely-ill patients, while attending the Emergency Department ED. We incorporate the use of data acquired from bed-side monitors into the EWS system, thereby offering the possibility of performing patient observations automatically, between manual observations.