A prospective study of consecutive emergency medical admissions to compare a novel automated computer-aided mortality risk score and clinical judgement of patient mortality risk
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Date
2019-06-19
Authors
Faisal, Muhammad
Khatoon, Binish
Scally, Andy
Richardson, Donald
Irwin, Sally
Davidson, Rachel
Heseltine, David
Corlett, Alison
Ali, Javed
Hampson, Rebecca
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
BMJ Publishing Group
Published Version
Abstract
Objectives: To compare the performance of a validated automatic computer-aided risk of mortality (CARM) score versus medical judgement in predicting the risk of in-hospital mortality for patients following emergency medical admission.Design: A prospective study.Setting: Consecutive emergency medical admissions in York hospital.Participants: Elderly medical admissions in one ward were assigned a risk of death at the first post-take ward round by consultant staff over a 2-week period. The consultant medical staff used the same variables to assign a risk of death to the patient as the CARM (age, sex, National Early Warning Score and blood test results) but also had access to the clinical history, examination findings and any immediately available investigations such as ECGs. The performance of the CARM versus consultant medical judgement was compared using the c-statistic and the positive predictive value (PPV).Results: The in-hospital mortality was 31.8% (130/409). For patients with complete blood test results, the c-statistic for CARM was 0.75 (95% CI: 0.69 to 0.81) versus 0.72 (95% CI: 0.66 to 0.78) for medical judgements (p=0.28). For patients with at least one missing blood test result, the c-statistics were similar (medical judgements 0.70 (95% CI: 0.60 to 0.81) vs CARM 0.70 (95% CI: 0.59 to 0.80)). At a 10% mortality risk, the PPV for CARM was higher than medical judgements in patients with complete blood test results, 62.0% (95% CI: 51.2 to 71.9) versus 49.2% (95% CI: 39.8 to 58.5) but not when blood test results were missing, 50.0% (95% CI: 24.7 to 75.3) versus 53.3% (95% CI: 34.3 to 71.7).Conclusions: CARM is comparable with medical judgements in discriminating in-hospital mortality following emergency admission to an elderly care ward. CARM may have a promising role in supporting medical judgements in determining the patient’s risk of death in hospital. Further evaluation of CARM in routine practice is required.
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Keywords
Automatic computer-aided risk of mortality (CARM) , Consecutive emergency medical admissions , Clinical judgement
Citation
Faisal, M., Khatoon, B., Scally, A., Richardson, D., Irwin, S., Davidson, R., Heseltine, D., Corlett, A., Ali, J., Hampson, R., Kesavan, S., McGonigal, G., Goodman, K., Harkness, M. and Mohammed, M. (2019) 'A prospective study of consecutive emergency medical admissions to compare a novel automated computer-aided mortality risk score and clinical judgement of patient mortality risk', BMJ Open, 9(6), e027741. (7pp.) DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-027741