Comparison of the accuracy of residents, senior physicians and surrogate decision-makers for predicting hospital mortality of critically ill patients

OBJECTIVE: To compare the predictive performance of residents, senior intensive care unit physicians and surrogates early during intensive care unit stays and to evaluate whether different presentations of prognostic data (probability of survival versus probability of death) influenced their performance. METHODS: We questioned surrogates and physicians in charge of critically ill patients during the first 48 hours of intensive care unit admission on the patient’s probability of hospital outcome. The question framing (i.e., probability of survival versus probability of death during hospitalization) was randomized. To evaluate the predictive performance, we compared the areas under the ROC curves (AUCs) for hospital outcome between surrogates and physicians’ categories. We also stratified the results according to randomized question framing. RESULTS: We interviewed surrogates and physicians on the hospital outcomes of 118 patients. The predictive performance of surrogate decisionmakers was significantly lower than that of physicians (AUC of 0.63 for surrogates, 0.82 for residents, 0.80 for intensive care unit fellows and 0.81 for intensive care unit senior physicians). There was no increase in predictive performance related to physicians’ experience (i.e., senior physicians did not predict outcomes better than junior physicians). Surrogate decisionmakers worsened their prediction performance when they were asked about probability of death instead of probability of survival, but there was no difference for physicians. CONCLUSION: Different predictive performance was observed when comparing surrogate decision-makers and physicians, with no effect of experience on health care professionals’ prediction. Question framing affected the predictive performance of surrogates but not of physicians.