Evaluation of an App-Based Mobile Triage System for Mass Casualty Incidents: Within-Subjects Experimental Study

Digitalization in disaster medicine holds significant potential to accelerate rescue operations and ultimately save lives. Mass casualty incidents demand rapid and accurate information management to coordinate effective responses. Currently, first responders manually record triage results on patient cards, and brief information is communicated to the command post via radio communication. Although this process is widely used in practice, it involves several time-consuming and error-prone tasks. To address these issues, we designed, implemented, and evaluated an app-based mobile triage system. This system allows users to document responder details, triage categories, injury patterns, GPS locations, and other important information, which can then be transmitted automatically to the incident commanders. This study aims to design and evaluate an app-based mobile system as a triage and coordination tool for emergency and disaster medicine, comparing its effectiveness with the conventional paper-based system. A total of 38 emergency medicine personnel participated in a within-subject experimental study, completing 2 triage sessions with 30 patient cards each: one session using the app-based mobile system and the other using the paper-based tool. The accuracy of the triages and the time taken for each session were measured. Additionally, we implemented the User Experience Questionnaire along with other items to assess participants' subjective ratings of the 2 triage tools. Our 2 (triage tool) × 2 (tool order) mixed multivariate analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect for the triage tool (P