# Pediatric Critical Care Illness Severity Toolkit: Stata Commands for Calculation of Pediatric Index of Mortality and Pediatric Logistic Organ Dysfunction Scores

## TL;DR

A new Stata toolkit simplifies and speeds up the calculation of pediatric critical care severity scores like PIM-3 and PELOD-2.

## Contribution

A validated, open-source Stata toolkit for calculating PIM-3, Simplified PIM-3, and PELOD-2 scores with improved accuracy and performance.

## Key findings

- The toolkit achieved 100% accuracy in synthetic data tests and manual checks.
- Processing times were 9.74 seconds for Simplified PIM-3, 14.06 seconds for PIM-3, and 21.82 seconds for PELOD-2 on 10 million records.
- The toolkit supports SI and Imperial units and includes a graphical interface and data validation.

## Abstract

Illness severity scoring tools, such as PRISM III/IV, PIM-3, and PELOD-2, are widely used in pediatric critical care research. However, their application is hindered by complex calculation processes, privacy concerns with third-party online calculators, and challenges in accurate implementation within statistical packages.

We have developed a comprehensive, open-source toolkit for implementing the PIM-3, Simplified PIM-3, and PELOD-2 scores. The toolkit includes the pim3 and pelod2 commands and is compatible with Stata versions 12 and above. It features robust data validation, error messaging, a graphical interface, and support for SI and Imperial units. The toolkit's accuracy was validated through unit testing and synthetic data, comparing results with existing implementations.

In performance tests, the toolkit exhibited a median processing time of 21.82 seconds for PELOD-2, 14.06 seconds for PIM-3, and 9.74 seconds for Simplified PIM-3, when applied to datasets of 10,000,000 records. It consistently achieved 100% accuracy in both synthetic data tests and manual spot checks.

The toolkit decreases processing time and improves accuracy in calculating pediatric critical care severity scores such as PELOD-2, PIM-3, and Simplified PIM-3. Its application in large datasets and validation highlights its utility as a tool for streamlining pediatric critical care research.