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Combining physician's subjective and physiology-based objective mortality risk predictions

Marcin JP, Pollack MM, Patel KM, Ruttimann UE

Critical care medicine, 2000

642 participants

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: None of the currently available physiology-based mortality risk prediction models incorporate subjective judgements of healthcare professionals, a source of additional information that could improve predictor performance and make such systems more acceptable to healthcare professionals. This study compared the performance of subjective mortality estimates by physicians and nurses with a physiology-based method, the Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM) III. Then, healthcare provider estimates were combined with PRISM III estimates using Bayesian statistics. The performance of the Bayesian model was then compared with the original two predictions.

DESIGN: Concurrent cohort study.

SETTING: A tertiary pediatric intensive care unit at a university affiliated children's hospital.

PATIENTS: Consecutive admissions to the pediatric intensive care unit.

INTERVENTIONS: None.

MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: For each of the 642 consecutive eligible patients, an exact mortality estimate and the degree of certainty (continuous scale from 1 to 5) associated with the estimate was collected from the attending, fellow, resident, and nurse responsible for the patient's care. Bayesian statistics were used to combine the PRISM III and certainty weighted subjective predictions to create a third Bayesian estimate of mortality. PRISM III discriminated survivors from nonsurvivors very well (area under curve [AUC], 0.924) as did the physicians and nurses (AUCs attendings, 0.953; fellows,…

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence Hub reads this as a cohort study, done in people. Its evidence level is 3 of 5 (Moderate · trial / cohort / secondary analysis). Trials without a large randomized design, cohorts and secondary analyses give moderate evidence. Reported size: 642 participants or records.

How the five levels of evidence work. The level is assigned automatically from the abstract and can be wrong, so check the paper.

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