The formation and design of the TRIAGE study--baseline data on 6005 consecutive patients admitted to hospital from the emergency department.

Background Patient crowding in emergency departments (ED) is a common challenge and associated with worsened outcome for the patients. Previous studies on biomarkers in the ED setting has focused on identification of high risk patients, and and the ability to use biomarkers to identify low-risk patients has only been sparsely examined. The broader aims of the TRIAGE study are to develop methods to identify low-risk patients appropriate for early ED discharge by combining information from a wide range of new inflammatory biomarkers and vital signs, the present baseline article aims to describe the formation of the TRIAGE database and characteristize the included patients.