Triage Score Calculator

ESI Level 1 is reserved for patients who need an immediate life-saving intervention right now -- think airway management, active resuscitation, or a crashing patient -- and it overrides every other consideration in the algorithm. Level 2 is for patients who are high-risk or unstable but not actively dying: they shouldn't wait in a general queue, but they don't need intervention within the next few minutes the way a Level 1 patient does.

Once a patient isn't Level 1 or Level 2, the ESI algorithm predicts how many distinct resource types -- labs, imaging, IV medications, specialty consultation, and similar -- the visit will likely need. Zero resources predicted is Level 5, exactly one resource is Level 4, and two or more resources is Level 3; a simple over-the-counter medication or a single prescription typically doesn't count as a "resource" under the standard definition.

Yes -- vital signs are only one of the ESI's decision points. A patient in severe pain, showing a high-risk mechanism of injury, or with an altered mental status can be triaged as Level 2 even with normal heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation, because those situations are considered too dangerous to wait regardless of what the numbers currently show.

No -- ESI itself only assigns the 1-5 acuity level based on the decision points above. The wait-time and admission-percentage figures this calculator shows are general operational guidelines meant to illustrate what each level typically implies in practice, not official ESI outputs, and real emergency departments vary widely in actual wait times and admission rates by level.