Predicting the mortality risk of ICU patients in Booali hospital using APACHE III system

The ability to estimate the mortality risk, especially in costing setting like ICU, is of great importance in order to evaluate new treatments, resource consumption control and improve quality control. Acute physiology and chronic health evaluation system (APACHE) is developed to predict critical care outcomes. In this system, according to the setting, a score is considered for each patients. Then using an equation, predicted mortality risk for each patients could be estimated. In a prospective study, we observed 269 ICU patients over a 10-month period. We calculated APACHE III scores for each patient and predicted mortality risk. Accuracy of the results were checked with regression analysis. Totally, 51.7% of patients were female while the mean age was 61.2 years. APACHE III average score was 60.6. Predicted mortality risk was 25.6% while actual death rate was 27.1%, therefore, SMR (actual death rate to predicted mortality risk ratio) was 1.05. Results revealed an association between actual death rate and APACHE III score and patient's age (P =0.0001), however, sex and death rate were not statistically correlated. The obtained SMR represents direct linear association between predicted and actual death rate (P=0.0001).