Thursday, February 9, 2012

Online mortality calculator could change healthcare

The Daily Beast reports: When a team of researchers at University of California, San Francisco, started collecting tools for predicting the likelihood of death, they thought their work would be used primarily by physicians. But the project ended up as an interactive tool that would be of interest to medical professionals, elderly patients—and the morbidly curious alike.
The site, ePrognosis.org, displays 16 different methods for determining a person’s chances of dying in the near future. The team designed the site so that doctors could have something better to go on than average life expectancy and intuition when deciding what treatments to recommend for elderly patients. The hope is that a better understanding of life expectancy will help patients and doctors decide on treatments—for instance, sparing a patient with advanced cancer from an invasive procedure for an ailment that likely will never have the chance to become a problem.

The tools aren’t new. Many were publicly available before, or kept behind medical-journal paywalls. But this is the first time so many have been assembled in one place, ranked according to their accuracy, and made so user friendly. A doctor—or anyone who clicks a button saying she’s a doctor—can plug in the relevant medical information and get a prognosis: 59 percent chance of dying within four years for an elderly diabetic male smoker with a history of congestive heart failure, for example.