AIIMS Delhi AI Triage System Cuts Emergency Wait Times by 40% in Six-Month Pilot
Amit Yadav
A six-month AIIMS Delhi pilot shows AI triage cut emergency wait times by 40% and correctly escalated 94% of high-acuity patients — with a national rollout under evaluation.
A six-month pilot at AIIMS New Delhi has demonstrated that an AI-powered triage system can reduce average emergency department wait times by 40%, according to a study published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research. The system, developed in collaboration with IIT Delhi's healthcare AI lab, uses a combination of vital sign monitoring, symptom NLP, and historical patient data to prioritise cases in real time.
How the System Works
When a patient arrives at the AIIMS emergency department, a nurse records basic vitals — blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, temperature — into a tablet interface. The AI model, trained on anonymised records from 2.1 million AIIMS visits between 2015 and 2023, produces a triage priority score within 90 seconds, along with a plain-language summary of the top differential diagnoses.
The system does not replace clinical judgment. Rather, it flags patients who might be under-triaged by busy staff — for example, a patient presenting with vague chest discomfort who scores high-risk on the AI model due to subtle ECG pattern changes.
Results and Rollout
During the pilot, average wait time for high-acuity patients dropped from 22 minutes to 13 minutes. The system correctly escalated 94% of patients who subsequently required ICU admission within 24 hours — a significant improvement over the 76% baseline.
AIIMS has announced plans to roll the system out to its trauma centre and to share the model weights with five other government hospitals under an open-access licence. The Ministry of Health is evaluating a national rollout under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission.