Prognostic performance of Emergency Severity Index (ESI) combined with qSOFA score

We conducted this study to investigate whether ESI combined with qSOFA score (ESI+qSOFA) predicts hospital outcome better than ESI alone in the emergency department (ED).

This was a retrospective study for patients aged over 15years who visited an ED of a tertiary referral hospital from January 1st, 2015 to December 31st, 2015. We calculated and compared predictive performances of ESI alone and ESI+qSOFA for prespecified outcomes. The primary outcome was hospital mortality, and the secondary outcome was composite outcome of in-hospital mortality and ICU admission. We calculated in-hospital mortality rates by positive qSOFA in each subgroup divided according to ESI levels (1, 2, 3, 4+5).

43,748 patients were enrolled. The area under receiver-operating characteristics curves were higher in ESI+qSOFA than in ESI alone for both mortality and composite outcome (0.786 vs. 0.777, P<.001 for mortality; 0.778 vs. 0.774, P<.001 for composite outcome). In each subgroup divided by ESI levels, patients with positive qSOFA had significantly higher in-hospital mortality rate compared to those with negative qSOFA (20.4% vs. 14.7%, P=.117 in ESI level 1 subgroup; 11.3% vs. 2.7%, P=.001 in ESI level 2 subgroup; 2.3% vs. 0.4%, P<.001 in ESI level 3 subgroup; 0.0% vs. 0.0% in ESI level 4 or 5 subgroup).

The prognostic performance of ESI+qSOFA for in-hospital mortality was significantly higher than that of ESI alone. Within each subgroup, patients with positive qSOFA had higher in-hospital mortality compared to those with negative qSOFA.