NCEPOD and the UCL/UCLH Surgical Outcomes Research Centre (SOuRCe) have launched a free app version of the Surgical Outcome Risk Tool (SORT) that is available from the App Store and Google Play Store.
The SORT app was developed by researchers from NCEPOD and SOuRCe to provide a percentage mortality risk for death within 30 days of surgery for adult inpatients, except for cardiac, neurosurgery, obstetrics and transplant patients. The project was described in a paper published in the British Journal of Surgery.
App project lead and lead author Karen Protopapa stated: “We developed a simple tool that could be used together with clinical judgement and as part of the overall surgical toolkit. SORT provides a mortality estimate that can help set the scene to identify high risk patients, who might benefit from interventions such as admission to critical care. It could also contribute to preoperative assessments, the consent process and shared decision-making with patients and aid resource planning.”
SORT was validated on over 16,000 patients from an NCEPOD study, which included 326 hospitals. The app allows rapid and easy data entry and consists entirely of preoperative variables and has an advantage over many other risk prediction tools. SORT was also found to have greater accuracy than two other published preoperative tools when analysed. To date this work represents the largest analysis of risk prediction tools in a group of UK patients undergoing inpatient surgery across different surgical specialties. A survey in 2015 indicated that SORT is already being used in areas such as preoperative assessment and high risk clinics, emergency and surgery departments.
Co-author and director of SOuRCe, Ramani Moonesinghe, said: “We are delighted that clinicians are adopting SORT to assist their assessments of patients before surgery. Risk evaluation is a key tenet of high quality care, and we hope that the SORT app will support clinicians in implementing a comprehensive preoperative assessment.”
