Can the Emergency Surgery Score (ESS) predict outcomes in emergency general surgery patients with missing data elements? A nationwide analysis

Background: The Emergency Surgery Score (ESS) is an accurate mortality risk calculator for emergency general surgery (EGS). We sought to assess whether ESS can accurately predict 30-day morbidity, mortality, and requirement for postoperative Intensive Care Unit (ICU) care in patients with missing data variables.

Methods: All EGS patients with one or more missing ESS variables in the 2007-2015 ACS-NSQIP database were included. ESS was calculated assuming that a missing variable is normal (i.e. no additional ESS points). The correlation between ESS and morbidity, mortality, and postoperative ICU level of care was assessed using the c-statistics methodology.

Results: Out of a total of 4,456,809 patients, 359,849 were EGS, and of those 256,278 (71.2%) patients had at least one ESS variable missing. ESS correlated extremely well with mortality (c-statistic = 0.94) and postoperative requirement of ICU care (c-statistic = 0.91) and well with morbidity (c-statistic = 0.77).

Conclusion: ESS performs well in predicting outcomes in EGS patients even when one or more data elements are missing and remains a useful bedside tool for counseling EGS patients and for benchmarking the quality of EGS care.