Prognosis after AIDS: A severity index based on experts’ judgements

Survival after diagnosis of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) differs greatly depending upon the type of complications the patient experiences. A detailed understanding of this variation in survival is an essential component of health care planning so that demands for hospital beds and other health care resources can be more realistically anticipated. Two severity indices for predicting the prognosis of AIDS patients using additive and multiplicative multi-attribute utility models were developed. A panel of physicians described the scoring of each index. On 97 randomly selected patient profiles, both severity scores to the clinical assessments of the expert panel were compared. The multiplicative index was more accurate than the additive index. The multiplicative scoring system for AIDS severity is described.