Common laboratory tests predict imminent medical emergency team calls, intensive care unit admission or death in emergency department patients

Abstract

Objective: To estimate the ability of commonly measured laboratory variables to predict imminent (within the same or next calendar day) medical emergency team (MET) calls, ICU admission or death. Methods: We performed a retrospective observational study of ED patients. We estimated the ability of each laboratory variable or combination of variables together with patient age to predict imminent MET calls, ICU admission or death. We externally validated our findings in patients from a different hospital. Results: We studied 160341 batches in 71453 ED patients (average age: 59.9 ± 22.1 years) for a total of 1 million individual measurements. There were 341 MET calls, 160 ICU admissions from the..