The right scan, at the right priority, every time.

The Triage Tool puts the national radiology prioritisation criteria in every triager's hands — a searchable library of clinical scenarios, each mapped to a recommended modality and a P1–P5 / S1–S5 priority, with an AI matcher that reads referral text.

Health NZ · national triage criteria 461 scenarios · 17 clinical areas Open to all clinicians — no login to browse

National consistency, one referral at a time

Radiology waiting lists are only fair if the same referral gets the same priority in Invercargill as in Whangārei. The Triage Tool encodes the National Radiology Network's by-clinical-indication criteria as a living, searchable reference.

A scenario library

Hundreds of clinical scenarios written and maintained by section leads, organised into 17 clinical areas — Breast to Vascular — each with modality, priority and guidance comment.

Search-first

Paste the referral text and let the AI find the best-matching scenario, with a confidence rating and its reasoning — or fall back to fast keyword search and section browsing.

The priority framework

P1–P5, S1–S5 and acute categories with their turnaround targets, plus service disruption levels — the whole national prioritisation guide, one click away.

Triage Tool · Home
The Triage Tool home screen — a large search
          box inviting the user to paste a clinical scenario, with chips for each of the 17
          clinical areas and their scenario counts.
The whole tool starts from one box: describe the case, or browse by clinical area. Click any screenshot to enlarge it.

Scenarios, sections and priorities

Three structures carry the tool: the content hierarchy, the anatomy of a scenario, and the national priority categories.

The content hierarchy

Content is maintained by clinical section leads, whose names sit on every section.

Section17 clinical areas, e.g. Neurology, Breast, Spine
Subheadinge.g. “Palpable breast masses”
Scenariothe unit of triage guidance

Every scenario has a stable deep link, so a specific recommendation can be shared in an email or pasted into a triage note.

Anatomy of a scenario

Tx Clinical scenario — the presentation, written to match real referral wording
M Modality — recommended imaging, with alternatives (e.g. Mammogram / US)
P Priority — P/S category, including split cases like “P3 or P2”
C Comment — the clinical reasoning: when to upgrade, what modifies the call

The priority categories

P categories run from referral receipt; S categories anchor to a clinically specified target date.

P1 must be imaged within a week; P2 within two; P3 within six; P4 and P5 are deferrable if capacity is constrained. The in-app Priority Guide carries the full definitions and turnaround targets.

The rest of the surface

Beyond search: browsing, the priority guide, and the editorial machinery that keeps content trustworthy.

For every user
Browse

Sections & scenarios

Everyone · no login

The browse view pairs a clinical-areas sidebar with expandable subheadings. Scenario cards show the priority badge, recommended modality with alternatives, the modality note, and the comment — the full recommendation in one glance.

  • Section header shows last-updated date and the section leads
  • Deep-linked scenarios scroll into view and highlight
  • A compact mode tightens the layout for triage-session use
Browse · Breast › Palpable breast masses
The browse view showing the Breast
            section with the Palpable breast masses subheading expanded — scenario cards
            with priority badges, modalities and comments.
Scenario cards: priority badge, modality, guidance note and upgrade criteria, side by side.
Reference

Priority Guide

Everyone · no login

The National Prioritisation Guide as a page: full definitions and turnaround targets for P and S categories, the acute priority tiers, service disruption levels 1–4 with their imaging implications, and the reset-and-restore equity rules.

Equity is in the framework. If services must be paused, services for Māori and other at-risk populations are the last stopped in any priority band, and the first restarted.
Priority Guide · P categories
The National Prioritisation Guide page
            showing the P1 to P5 definitions with overall turnaround and reporting targets, and
            collapsed panels for S categories, acute priorities and service disruption levels.
P1–P5 with their turnaround and reporting targets; S categories, acute tiers and disruption levels below.
For section leads & editors
Editorial

Editor mode

Editors · login

Signed-in editors flip into edit mode from the header and work directly on the live page. The editing model is deliberately conservative — every change is draft-only until an explicit save with confirmation.

  • Modality set via tokenised pills from the standard list (CT, MRI, US, XR…) — no free-text drift
  • Priority set via P1–P5 / S1–S5 buttons, with adjacent pairs like “P2/P3” supported
  • An “imaging not indicated” toggle for scenarios where the right answer is no scan
  • Section lead lists are editable per section, so accountability stays visible

From 461 scenarios toward 2,500 — grounded in real referrals

The hand-written library is high quality but covers a fraction of what actually arrives in referral queues. An AI pipeline mines a year of real CT and MRI referral data to propose new scenarios — every one held for section-lead review before patients' care depends on it.

1

Classify

Claude reads real referrals in interleaved CT/MRI batches, groups them into clinical scenarios, and maps each to the existing section structure — merging the same clinical question across modalities into one scenario.

2

Deduplicate & consolidate

Similarity matching merges duplicates across batches, then a second, stronger model pass consolidates clinically-equivalent scenarios and rewrites them into professional, matchable wording — ~7,500 raw groupings down to ~2,100.

3

Filter & tier

Quality gates drop low-confidence output, then scenarios split by evidence: those supported by 3+ independent referrals go to the visible primary tier; thinner ones wait in an editors-only review pool. Three layers of dedup keep the library clean.

4

Section-lead review

AI-generated scenarios render with distinct amber styling and a badge until a section lead approves them — at which point they become indistinguishable from manual content — or rejects them into a retrievable archive. Nothing AI-written silently becomes doctrine.

Where it stands. Production currently serves the 461 section-lead-authored scenarios. ~700 high-confidence AI scenarios and a ~1,400-strong review pool are staged on the beta environment awaiting section-lead validation before promotion.

Small, fast, and public-facing

Like its siblings, the Triage Tool runs entirely on Cloudflare's edge — which matters more here, because this one is open to every clinician without a login.

Frontend

React 18 + TypeScript · Vite · Tailwind · Cloudflare Pages

  • Search-first home, sidebar browse view
  • Hash-based deep links to individual scenarios
  • HNZ design system, mobile-friendly for ward use

Backend

Cloudflare Worker (Hono) · D1 · R2 · Claude on AWS Bedrock

  • SQLite FTS5 full-text index with BM25 column weighting
  • Clinical synonym expansion and fuzzy fallback
  • AI matching and the scenario-generation pipeline via Bedrock
  • Soft deletes throughout — content is archived, never destroyed
The takeaway. The Triage Tool turns a static national criteria document into a living clinical instrument: searchable in seconds, consistent across the country, maintained by named section leads, and growing from evidence in real referral data — with humans holding the approval pen.