Severity of Illness

ABSTRACT

Severity of illness scores are increasingly used in the intensive care environment to help predict outcome, to characterize disease severity and degree of organ dysfunction, to stratify patients for clinical trial enrollment, to assess resource use, and to compare intensive care unit (ICU) performance. This article reviews the most commonly used severity of illness scoring systems and discusses some of their uses and limitations.

KEYWORDS

Organ dysfunction - outcome prediction - mortality

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