Mortality Risk Score for Critically Ill Patients with Viral or Unspecified Pneumonia - Assisting Clinicians with COVID-19 ECMO Planning.

Respiratory complications due to coronavirus have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in 2020 Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a life-sustaining oxygenation and ventilation therapy that may be used when mechanical ventilation is insufficient While early planning and surgical cannulation for ECMO can increase survival, clinicians report the lack of a risk score hinders these efforts We develop the PEER score to highlight critically ill patients with viral or unspecified pneumonia at high risk of mortality in a subpopulation eligible for ECMO The score is validated across two critical care datasets, and predicts mortality at least as well as other existing risk scores © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG