Investigations describing the utilization pattern and comparing the outcome from emergency and mass casualty situations are limited by the lack of a reliable and valid patient classification system. In this study we briefly describe the use of APACHE (Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation), a physiologically based classification system for measuring severity of illness in groups of critically ill patients, as a tool in comparing outcomes of 1437 ICU admissions from eight European and five American hospitals. Because of the successful results from this pilot effort, we believe that APACHE could be used to compare the performance of hospitals in an emergency or mass casualty situation.
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