Injury severity determination: requirements, approaches, and applications

Injury severity determination serves multiple purposes in trauma care systems by aiding prehospital triage, assisting clinical management, and facilitating outcome evaluation. Numerous authors have described methods for quantifying injury severity, most of which use physiologic status or anatomic injury. For prehospital triage, such determination assists decisions regarding patient priority, disposition, and destination. For clinical management, it provides essential information on initial condition and eventual course, including response to therapy. Finally, for outcome evaluation, it enables objective assessment of care quality, using techniques that determine appropriateness of disability, morbidity, mortality, and reimbursement, based on case mix.