The emergency department trigger tool: a novel approach to screening for quality and safety events.

This study assessed the performance of an automated emergency department (ED) trigger tool designed to identify a more efficient sample of adverse event cases for chart review. Beginning with a set of 97 candidate triggers, researchers identified those triggers associated with adverse events and arrived at a narrowed set of 30 triggers, eliminating almost half of the population of records eligible for manual review. This computerized query may eliminate the need for manual screening for triggers.