ICU scoring systems

Editor-In-Chief: C. Michael Gibson, M.S., M.D. [1]

Overview

There are several scoring systems in intensive care units (ICUs) today.

These scoring systems can be used on patients age 15 and up.

APACHE II was designed to provide a morbidity score for a patient. It is useful to decide what kind of treatment or medicine is given. Methods exist to derive a predicted mortality from this score, but these methods are not too well defined and rather unprecise.
SAPS II was designed to provide a predicted mortality, that does not reflect the expected mortality for a particular patient, but is good for benchmarking. In a rather simple way, it makes it possible to provide a single number that describes the morbidity of a number of patients.
SAPS III was designed to provide a realistic predicted mortality for a particular patient or a particular group of patients. It does this by calibrating against known mortalities on an existing set of patients, for a specific definition of mortality (like 30-days mortality). This way, it can answer questions like "Did we improve our quality of care from 2004 to 2005?" or "If hospital A's patients had been treated at hospital B, would they have a better or a worse mortality?".

PIM2 delivers a predicted mortality value, intended to be used for benchmarking.,

SOFA was designed to provide a simple daily score, that indicates how the status of the patient evolves over time.
Glasgow Coma Scale (also named GCS) is designed to provide the status for the central nervous system. It is often used as part of other scoring systems.