Covid-19 Story Tip: Dynamic Tool Accurately Predicts Risk of COVID-19 Progressing to Severe Disease or Death

Now, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have developed an advanced machine-learning system that can accurately predict how a patient's bout with COVID-19 will go, and relay its findings back to the clinician in an easily understandable form. The new prognostic tool, known as the Severe COVID-19 Adaptive Risk Predictor (SCARP), can help define the one-day and seven-day risk of a patient hospitalized with COVID-19 developing a more severe form of the disease or dying from it. SCARP asks for a minimal amount of input to give an accurate prediction, making it fast, simple to use and reliable for basing treatment and care decisions. The new tool is described in a paper first posted online March 2 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "SCARP was designed to provide clinicians with a predictive tool that is interactive and adaptive, enabling real-time clinical variables to be entered at a patient's bedside," says Matthew Robinson, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and senior author of the paper.