The Simplified Acute Physiology Score III (SAPS III) is a system for predicting mortality, 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 ...

. It is a supplement to the

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 ...

scoring system. It has been designed to provide a real-life predicted mortality for a patient by following a well defined procedure, based on a mathematical model that needs

calibration In measurement technology and metrology, calibration is the comparison of measurement values delivered by a device under test with those of a calibration standard of known accuracy. Such a standard could be another measurement device of know ...

. Predicted mortalities are good when comparing groups of patients, and having near-real-life mortalities means, that this scoring system can answer questions like "if the patients from hospital A had been in hospital B, what would their mortality have been?". However, in order to achieve this functionality, you must calibrate the system, which is additional effort, and it is difficult to compare two groups of patients if they were not scored using the same calibration. SAPS III is therefore not suitable by itself for publishing data about 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 a single group of patients. The SAPS III project is conducted by the SAPS III Outcomes Research Group (SORG). Some shared calibrations make it possible to calculate a calibration-specific SAPS III score using paper forms.

DID SAPS III

The Danish Intensive care Database (DID) has a standard-form to calculate SAPS III scores for their specific purpose, and require participating ICUs to provide: * Age * Length of hospital stay before admission to the ICU * What kind of department did the patient arrive from * A checklist of specific diagnoses that the patient has had * Earlier treatments using vasoactive drugs * Was the patient admitted acutely or planned? * A checklist of why the patient was admitted to the ICU * Surgery: Acute surgery, planned surgery or no surgery * Type of surgery * Acute infections at admission * Estimated Glasgow Coma Score * Serum Bilirubin * Body temperature * Serum Creatinine * Heart Rate * Leukocyte count * pH * Thrombocyte (platelet) count * Systolic blood pressure * Oxygenation (PaO2/FiO2 and PaO2, ventilation) Each of these values are given points based on value intervals, similar to

, and a score is calculated. The actual result is not a general SAPS III score, but can be considered an updated version of SAPS II.

References

External links

The SAPS III Outcome Research Group

SAPS 3—From evaluation of the patient to evaluation of the intensive care unit.

Guide to registering SAPS III (Danish)

Online calculator of the SAPS III
{{Intensive care medicine Diagnostic intensive care medicine Medical scoring system