Clinical care
Triage
Triage is the structured process of sorting patients by clinical urgency on arrival, usually in an emergency department, so that the sickest are seen first, using a validated scale that assigns each patient a priority category and a target time to assessment.
Why it matters
In a crowded emergency department, patients who look well can wait while their condition worsens. Triage decides who waits and who does not. For low resource settings, WHO, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières developed the Interagency Integrated Triage Tool [1].
Key points
- The Australasian Triage Scale uses five categories, each with a maximum waiting time to medical assessment [2].
- A review in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization examined the triage systems used in low resource emergency care settings [3].
- Patients should be reassessed while they wait, because their condition can change.
- Recording the triage category and the times of arrival, triage and assessment lets a hospital measure waiting times against target.
In Moana
Moana is configured to the triage and registration instruments a hospital already uses, and the triage record becomes part of the same patient record in the Moana EHR.
Sources
- Interagency Integrated Triage Tool, World Health Organization, accessed 2026
- Policy on the Australasian Triage Scale, Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, accessed 2026
- Triage systems in low resource emergency care settings, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2025
Read the guide: Digitising the emergency department: triage, registration and flow
In the platform: Moana EHR
Related terms: Early warning score, Clinical documentation, Master patient index
Updated 2026-11-03. Written under Moana’s editorial standards.