Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the systemic distribution and burden of organ failure were well described within the intensive care unit (ICU) but not in other acute care settings. At the pandemic’s peak, resources like ICU beds and ventilators were scarce, prompting many states to implement allocation guidelines. These guidelines often used the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) to measure organ failure and allocate life-sustaining technologies like ventilators. However, to reliably use such a system on a larger scale would require real-time automatic calculations of SOFA scores. The feasibility of such efforts demonstrated in resource-rich ICU settings may provide more objective ways for hospital leaders and providers to allocate resources during periods of local, regional, or national scarcity. To understand the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on organ failure, these investigators implemented an automated SOFA score calculator to describe the frequency and location of organ failure and its association with length...

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