Prognosis After AIDS: A Severity Index Based on Experts' Judgments

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. We developed two severity indices for predicting the prognosis of AIDS patients using additive and multiplicative multi-attribute utility models. A panel of physicians described the scoring of each index. On 97 randomly selected patient profiles, we compared both severity scores to the clinical assessments of the expert panel. The multiplicative index was more accurate than the additive index. We describe the multiplicative scoring system for AIDS severity.