About

Our goal

The SAPS 3 study group is an international scientific initiative that aims to facilitate and improve of sophisticated methods for risk adjustment in outcome research in critically ill patients.

Risk adjustment systems have a fixed place in critical care research for various purposes. At patient level, the reporting of severity of illness and the use of risk-adjusted mortality rates to draw inferences from their results are prerequisites for any study to be published.

At intensive care unit (ICU) level, observed-to-expected mortality ratios and the use of direct standardisation techniques based on severity scores have become standard for assessing the impact of ICU-related factors on outcome, such as the effects of organisation and management.

Our published work

The SAPS 3 study group conducted the SAPS 3 study in 2003 and published its findings starting from 2005. SAPS 3 (“Simplified Acute Physiology Score 3”) has since become a widely-used scoring system worldwide. As a study group, we seek to continuously support the medical and scientific community with information needed.

Our current project

Most of outcome prediction tools are designed to approximate the risk of mortality during hospital stay immediately at the time of admission to intensive care. They are not optimised to predict outcomes at later stages in the course of patient care, such as at the time of clinical improvement and planned discharge from the ICU.

The SAPS 3 study group aims to develop a scoring and prediction system to fill this need. The SAPS 3D project (“Simplified Acute Physiology Score 3 at ICU Discharge”) projects aims to develop a model that is capable of predicting the risk of readmission to intensive care and the risk of death during the same hospital stay after discharge from ICU in patients discharged without limitations of treatment or readmission.

It shall allow the development of an extended body of knowledge describing the main determinants of readmission risk and late mortality in patients discharged from ICUs. This knowledge will be disseminated within the scientific community, allowing a better evaluation of patients before discharge from intensive care units and optimisation of the transition process from ICUs to wards and step-down units.