Clinics in chest medicine
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Clinics in chest medicine · Dec 2003
ReviewPrognostication and intensive care unit outcome: the evolving role of scoring systems.
Prognostic scoring systems remain important in clinical practice. They enable us to characterize our patient populations with robust measures for predicted mortality. This allows us to audit our own experience in the context of institutional quality control measures and facilitates, albeit imperfectly, comparisons across units and patient populations. ⋯ These measures may also be used for research to better characterize the natural history and course of a certain disease group or population. Also, they may be used in innovative ways to predict ICU mortality and post-ICU long-term morbidity. These current and developing applications will help us to further understand the link between ICU severity of illness and long-term morbidity as we move beyond survival as the sole measure of ICU outcome.