A study on a novel scoring system for the evaluation of expected mortality in ICU-patients

Patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) require huge resources because of the dysfunction of several of their vital organs. The heterogeneity and complexity of the ICU patients have generated interest in systems able to measure severity of illness as a method of predicting outcome, compare quality-of-care, analyze the costs of treating critically ill patients, evaluate stratification of clinical trials. The present work aims at developing a new scoring system to assess the severity of illness of patients admitted to general ICUs, by an observational, prospective, cohort study. The model will be developed in the period of study considering a population of the general ICU at the University Hospital Polyclinic of Tor Vergata so that the data obtained will be usable for Italian health care resource management and ICU performance evaluation within the hospital, the region, and nationwide. The proposed scoring system will revise the presently available systems, in the attempt to overcome their major drawbacks in the definition of the input variables, in the mathematical model employed to process them and the considered outcome. An important and qualifying point of this work lies in the attention paid to quantify and process the different sources of uncertainty, originated by the approximations introduced in the considered model and in the collection stage of the predictor variables.