National Early Warning Score in Predicting Severe Adverse Outcomes of Emergency Medicine Patients: A Retrospective Cohort Study

BACKGROUND: For emergency triage, it is very important to identify patient severity according to their vital signs and chief complaint. Several studies have examined the predictive value of the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) for specific emergency patients and have shown it to be effective. However, few have studied the utility of NEWS in emergency triage for general emergency medicine patients. The aim of this research was to investigate the performance of NEWS in emergency triage with regard to predicting adverse outcomes. METHODS: This was a retrospective cohort study carried out at a tertiary care center hospital in Jinhua, China. A total of 62,403 patients attending the emergency department (ED) from January to December 2018 were included. The NEWS, Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), and quick Sepsis Related Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) score were obtained from emergency triage. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to evaluate the associations between the NEWS, MEWS, and qSOFA, as well as those between other parameters with ED mortality. The predictive performances for emergency observation, death, and intensive care unit (ICU) admission of NEWS, MEWS and qSOFA were compared to the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). RESULTS: Of the total participants, 6502 were placed under emergency observation, 106 died in the ED, 638 were admitted to the ICU, and 324 died in-hospital. The NEWS, qSOFA, age, and gender were significantly associated with ED mortality. NEWS was significantly better at discriminating all outcomes, and the area under the curve and 95% confidence intervals for ED mortality, observation in ED, composite of ED mortality and ICU admission, and in-hospital mortality were 0.862 (0.859–0.865), 0.691 (0.687–0.695), 0.859 (0.856–0.861), and 0.805 (0.802–0.808), respectively. CONCLUSION: NEWS shows good performance in discriminating critical emergency patients in ED triage for emergency medicine patients.