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Welcome to the TriagePic-WinStore Wiki!
- Release 7, November, 2015. Software version 3.7
- SOON: Release 8, December, 2015. Software version 3.8
- App Listing in Windows Store
- Developed and released for Windows 8.1. Windows 8.0 version no longer available.
- Tested for compatibility with Windows 10. See User Guide and Supplement.
Below is the main description from the Windows Store of the latest released version, slightly adapted for this wiki page.
TriagePic® is meant to aid hospitals and other organizations handling disaster-response medical triage. It helps quickly gather photos and minimal information about disaster victims arriving at a perimeter triage station, particularly to assist with family reunification.
TriagePic is part of a system for that purpose developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and available for adoption by your organization. TriagePic as offered here (and for other platforms) allows you to test and evaluate that system, of which there are two main components:
- A “TriageTrak” web site (of which NLM provides a persistent demo instance), where
- User accounts are managed for hospital staff.
- Disaster events are defined and opened for reporting.
- Hospital staff, such as Emergency Operation Center personnel and family-reunification counselors, can perform searches for patients who have arrived or been reported to counselors by family members.
- Displays of reported people and of hospital-arrival statistics can be inspected.
- Staffers can report and edit arrivals.
- TriagePic, an app optimized to provide a quick first-report of disaster victims that arrive at triage station(s). Each arrival gets a picture taken, a mass-casualty ID assigned, and, based on severity, a triage zone for treatment decided. With time of the essence, little patient info is collected at this station, only:
- ID
- Optional picture and name
- Gender
- Pediatric versus adult patient
- Triage zone, designated by color (e.g., green, yellow, red, black) and name
Each completed report is immediately sent to TriageTrak (specifically, the NLM demo instance), or queued for later if need be.
Know Before You Download: You will need to get “hospital staff” credentials to use and evaluate the demo system, including TriagePic. For how, see "Support Contact Info" or "How To Get TriageTrak Credentials" below. The demo system is for testing with “fake patient” reports, not real patients.
NLM provides broadly-similar versions of no-cost TriagePic for Windows 7 and other platforms. The features listed next focus just on the Windows 8.1 Store App (which will also work under Windows 10). For more, see User Guide to TriagePic from the Windows Store.
- TriagePic will play well with touch tablets and non-touch 8.1 and 10 laptops.
- Reports specify the disaster event, date and time, and (optionally) who is manning the triage station.
- Photos are captured by the device camera(s), or from your Pictures folder.
- Mass-casualty IDs can be constrained to your desired format.
- IDs can auto-increment, or be manually adjusted; alignable with pre-printed triage forms.
- Browse, sort, or filter reports sent from this device (in Outbox)
- Likewise with reports sent from other devices (in All Stations).
- Search by patient name or mass-casualty ID, or use more advanced filtering.
- For a report of interest, view it in detail, edit, or delete.
- Review statistics of sent reports as itemized charts.
- Code for TriagePic for Windows 8.1 (only) is available under an open-source license. (Other platforms may be open-sourced sometime after 2015.)
For the NLM-provided App in the Microsoft Windows Store, “Standard Application License Terms” for the Store apply. Source code in the repository here is open-source licensed
This app has not been tested on ARM devices (i.e., RT) at NLM, but a field tester with a Surface 2 used v3.3 to report successful. External USB or Bluetooth barcode readers may work with this app but have not yet been field tested.
- NLM. The National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA.
- NIH. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, of which NLM is one.
- VS. Visual Studio, the development environment.
- TP8. The VS name of this project, and an informal name for the software. Also, "TP8" appears internally as a prefix to a number of C# classes.
- TT. TriageTrak, the web site to which TP8 reports.
- LPF. The "Lost Person Finder" project, which includes TriagePic and TriageTrak.
- LHC or LHNCBC. Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, within NLM.
- CEB. Communications Engineering Branch, within LHC. LPF is a CEB project.
TP8 development is on-going.
The code was first developed under Windows 8.0 (no longer supported) on Intel devices, and conversion to 8.1 began in mid-2014, under Visual Studio Express 2013. By December, 2014, there were two forks under parallel development:
- The original fork, called "TriagePic-WinStore", which started as a "minimal port to 8.1". This became the source of the Store releases. Early releases still had compile-time warnings about deprecated functionality, which were eventually resolved.
- An alternative fork, called "TriagePic-8.1", was developed as an "experimental maximal port to 8.1". While never fully working (particularly split pages), it did handle partial-screen landscape mode better. Helpful capabilities from this were copied over to TriagePic-WinStore. Circa Release 5, this obsolete alternative fork was deleted.
At this time, it is not planned to test or certify for ARM devices at NLM. However, a field tester with a Surface 2 tablet was able to successfully send in a patient report. The app as-is has been tested under Windows 10; subsequent retargeting for native Windows 10 is possible.
TriagePic is not a standalone product, although it can be used in offline mode. To be useful, it must report using "PLUS" custom web services to an instance of NLM's "TriageTrak". By default, the code reports to the demonstration instance https://triagetrak.nlm.nih.gov. The TriagePic user will need "hospital staff" (or, if your own instance, "hospital administrator") credentials at TriageTrak in order to report there.
TriageTrak (TT) is a customization of NLM's People Locator (PL), particularly focused on hospital support for mass-casualty events. PL and TT are related to the Sahana Software Foundation's "Vesuvius" open-source project, but differences in the provided web services and architecture means that TriagePic Windows Store will not work with Vesuvius at this time. Institutions that want to adopt their own instance of TT should contact and work with NLM to achieve this.
The "Developer Release Notes" (see sidebar at right) are actively maintained and the best place to see a chronological high-level overview of past work and that in progress. These notes are supplemented by the Github Issues tracker. "Potential Future Features", also actively revised, offers insight to a larger universe of desirable improvements.