Patient Triage and Guidance in Emergency Departments Using Large Language Models: Multimetric Study

Background: Emergency departments (EDs) face significant challenges due to overcrowding, prolonged waiting times, and staff shortages, leading to increased strain on health care systems. Efficient triage systems and accurate departmental guidance are critical for alleviating these pressures. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, offer potential solutions for improving patient triage and outpatient department selection in emergency settings. Objective: The study aimed to assess the accuracy, consistency, and feasibility of GPT-4-based ChatGPT models (GPT-4o and GPT-4-Turbo) for patient triage using the Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) and evaluate GPT-4o's ability to provide accurate outpatient department guidance based on simulated patient scenarios. Methods: A 2-phase experimental study was conducted. In the first phase, 2 ChatGPT models (GPT-4o and GPT-4-Turbo) were evaluated for MEWS-based patient triage accuracy using 1854 simulated patient scenarios. Accuracy and consistency were assessed before and after prompt engineering. In the second phase, GPT-4o was tested for outpatient department selection accuracy using 264 scenarios sourced from the Chinese Medical Case Repository. Each scenario was independently evaluated by GPT-4o thrice. Data analyses included Wilcoxon tests, Kendall correlation coefficients, and logistic regression analyses. Results: In the first phase, ChatGPT's triage accuracy, based on MEWS, improved following prompt engineering. Interestingly, GPT-4-Turbo outperformed GPT-4o. GPT-4-Turbo achieved an accuracy of 100% compared to GPT-4o's accuracy of 96.2%, despite GPT-4o initially showing better performance prior to prompt engineering. This finding suggests that GPT-4-Turbo may be more adaptable to prompt optimization. In the second phase, GPT-4o, with superior performance on emotional responsiveness compared to GPT-4-Turbo, demonstrated an overall guidance accuracy of 92.63% (95% CI 90.34%-94.93%), with the highest accuracy in internal medicine (93.51%, 95% CI 90.85%-96.17%) and the lowest in general surgery (91.46%, 95% CI 86.50%-96.43%). Conclusions:ChatGPT demonstrated promising capability for supporting patient triage and outpatient guidance in EDs. GPT-4-Turbo showed greater adaptability to prompt engineering, whereas GPT-4o exhibited superior responsiveness and emotional interaction, which are essential for patient-facing tasks. Future studies should explore real-world implementation and address the identified limitations to enhance ChatGPT's clinical integration.