Young-Min Kim, Chan Woong Kim, Kyung Hye Park, Hyo Joon Kim, Kyung Jun Song, Sung Phil Chung, Dong Ryul Ko, Tae Han Kim, on behalf of KSEM Quality Improvement in Residency Training Committee
In Press, Received January 7, 2026 Accepted March 25, 2026 Available online April 8, 2026
Objective Emergency department (ED) triage systems are used to classify the severity and urgency of emergency patients, and Korean medical institutions use the Korean Triage and Acuity Scale (KTAS). During the COVID-19 pandemic, appropriate treatment for emergency patients was delayed due to various circumstances, such as overcrowding of EDs, lack of medical workforce resources, and increased workload on medical staff. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of the KTAS in predicting the urgency of emergency patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods This study retrospectively reviewed patients who were treated in the ED during the pandemic period from January 2020 to June 2021. Patients were divided into COVID-19–screening negative (SN) and COVID-19–screening positive (SP) groups. We compared the predictability of the KTAS for urgent patients between the two groups. Results From a total of 107,480 patients, 62,776 patients (58.4%) were included in the SN group and 44,704 (41.6%) were included in the SP group. The odds ratios for severity variables at each KTAS level revealed a more evident discriminatory power of the KTAS for severity variables in the SN group (P<0.001). The predictability of the KTAS for severity variables was higher in the SN group than in the SP group (area under the curve, P<0.001). Conclusion During the pandemic, the KTAS had low accuracy in predicting patients in critical condition in the ED. Therefore, in future pandemic periods, supplementation of the current ED triage system should be considered in order to accurately classify the severity of patients.
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Prognostic value of novel indices combining Shock Index, Reverse Shock Index, age, and oxygen saturation for predicting mortality in COVID-19 patients in Iran at emergency department triage: a cross-sectional study Mehdi Torabi, Atefe Noroozpour, Neda Naeemi Bafghi, Moghaddameh Mirzaee Acute and Critical Care.2025; 40(3): 425. CrossRef
Objective During the past 20 years, over 1,400 doctors have been certified as emergency physicians in Korea. The number of scientific publications in the field of emergency medicine has also increased. This study aims to evaluate the research productivity of academic emergency physicians in South Korea.
Methods Articles published from 1996 to 2015 by authors affiliated with Korean emergency departments were retrieved using Pubmed, Embase, and Web of Science. Research productivity was analyzed quantitatively to ascertain the number of articles for publication type and year. The performance of these articles was also analyzed qualitatively using impact factor, citation number, and Hirsch index. Bibliometric analysis was performed by researching Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.
Results A total of 858 articles with 293 Korean authors as the first or corresponding authors were published across 191 journals. The number of publications increased continuously. The most common publication type was original article (n=618), the most commonly studied research topic was resuscitation medicine (n=110), and the average impact factor of the original articles was 2.158. The highest h-index was 17 and, using Web of Science, the maximum number of citations was found to be 85.
Conclusion This study suggests that the research productivity of Korean authors in the emergency medicine field has progressed steadily during the last 10 years. However, qualitative indexes, such as the number of citations and h-index value, remain low.
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