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.
