The Simplified Acute Physiology Score III (SAPS III) is a system for predicting mortality, one of several ICU scoring systems. It is a supplement to the SAPS II scoring system. It has been designed to provide a real-life predicted mortality for a patient by following a well defined procedure, based on a mathematical model that needs calibration.[1][2][3] Predicted mortalities are good when comparing groups of patients, and having near-real-life mortalities means, that this scoring system can answer questions like "if the patients from hospital A had been in hospital B, what would their mortality have been?".
However, in order to achieve this functionality, you must calibrate the system, which is additional effort, and it is difficult to compare two groups of patients if they were not scored using the same calibration. SAPS III is therefore not suitable by itself for publishing data about the morbidity of a single group of patients.
The SAPS III project is conducted by the SAPS III Outcomes Research Group (SORG).
Some shared calibrations make it possible to calculate a calibration-specific SAPS III score using paper forms.
The Danish Intensive care Database (DID) has a standard-form to calculate SAPS III scores for their specific purpose, and require participating ICUs to provide:[citation needed]
Each of these values are given points based on value intervals, similar to SAPS II, and a score is calculated. The actual result is not a general SAPS III score, but can be considered an updated version of SAPS II.