Surgical Outcome Risk Tool Helps With Risk Counseling

It is common practice in primary care to "clear" our patients for surgery, but we are not alone, since our colleagues in internal medicine and anesthesiology frequently perform the same duty. Previously here on iMedicalApps we reviewed a wonderful medical app by Dr. Joshua Steinberg called Preop Eval, which is designed to assist providers in making these complicated decisions a lot easier. A more recent review evaluated the PreOpGuide from TEAM Health Anesthesia, and found it to be a another worthy addition to the preop process. Neither medical app includes information on the mortality risk in patients from the surgery itself.

A 2014 study in the British Journal of Surgery published the results of Surgical Outcome Risk Tool (SORT). The tool, developed and validated by Protopapa et. al., predicts the 30-day mortality from surgery based on a number of variables, including the type of surgery, surgery severity, physical status, age of patient, etc. The authors validated the study on an observational cohort of more than 19,000 patients in the U.K. The medical app -- the Surgical Outcome Risk Tool -- takes the calculation derived from the study to create a useful point-of-care tool for informing the surgery team as well as patients and their families.

It does not replace standard preop clearance procedures (and their apps), but adds additional detail to the process of preop evaluation and patient counseling.

Likes:

• Takes an evidence-based tool and makes it available at the point of care.
• Easy to use and interpret data with ability to give feedback to developers.
• Excellent detailed information on interpretation of results, commentaries by the authors, numerous references, links to copy of original article.
• Available for Android.

Dislikes:

• No ability to print or email results of tool's calculations.
• No links to the references provided except for the author's article.
• Inability to save data to the medical app.

Overall:

The Surgical Outcome Risk Tool is a great example of taking a practice-changing/enhancing study and making it into an medical app. Many tools only remain in the article without a practical way to complete the calculations proposed by the authors. However, SORT takes the study by Protopapa, et al. and makes it into a highly usable point of care medical app to better inform providers and counsel patients and their families regarding the postop risks of surgery.

Check out the full review of the Surgical Outcomes Risk tool app at iMedicalApps.com. You can also download it on iTunes and Google Play.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

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Surgical Outcome Risk Tool Helps With Risk Counseling