PIM2 is a scoring system for rating the severity of medical illness for children, one of several

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

. Its name stands for "Paediatric Index of Mortality". It has been designed to provide a predicted mortality for a patient by following a well-defined procedure. Predicted mortalities are good when dealing with several patients, because the average predicted mortality for a group of patients is an indicator for the

morbidity A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical conditions that a ...

of these patients. Just like

APACHE II APACHE II ("Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II") is a severity-of-disease classification system, one of several ICU scoring systems. It is applied within 24 hours of admission of a patient to an intensive care unit (ICU): an int ...

and

SAPS II SAPS II is a severity of disease classification system. Its name stands for "Simplified Acute Physiology Score", and is one of several ICU scoring systems. Application SAPS II was designed to measure the severity of disease for patients admitted ...

, it does not provide a real-life predicted mortality. The standard is too old, variations in mortality are huge between countries and departments, and the definition of mortality is varying, too. However, PIM2 provides a good way to benchmark different sets of patients.

References

* this is the first published description of the scoring system Diagnostic intensive care medicine Medical scales {{Med-sign-stub