If you’ve ever watched an ambulance idling outside ED with its lights still flashing, you know the feeling: every extra minute is a patient stuck in pain and a crew stuck off the road.
Last month a quiet experiment at Lyell McEwin Hospital proved we don’t need a new billion-dollar wing to fix that — we just need better timing.
What happened?
Doctors and nurses trialled a simple tool called the Adelaide Score. It’s a tiny AI that lives inside the existing patient record and answers one question:
“Is this person ready to go home tomorrow?”
Every time a nurse charts obs, or a doctor taps in ward-round notes, the Score digests the lot and flashes a percentage.



