Thursday, January 12, 2012

Interactive Tools to Assess the Likelihood of Death

Paula Span, The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2012

From the article: "To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left. Now, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have identified 16 assessment scales with “moderate” to “very good” abilities to determine the likelihood of death within six months to five years in various older populations. Moreover, the authors have fashioned interactive tools of the most accurate and useful assessments." Read more

See Also
Estimating Prognosis for Elders
ePrognosis