ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic it became evident that outcome prediction of patients is crucial for triaging, when resources are limited and enable early start or increase of available therapeutic support. COVID-19 demographic risk factors for severe disease and death were rapidly established, including age and sex. Common Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) and Early Warning Systems (EWS) have been used to triage based on demographics, vital signs and laboratory results. However, all of these have limitations, such as dependency of laboratory investigations or set threshold values, were derived from more or less specific cohort studies. Instead, individual illness dynamics and patterns of recovery might be essential characteristics in understanding the critical course of illness.The pandemic has been a game changer for data, and the concept of real-time massive health data has emerged as one of the important tools in battling the pandemic. We here describe the advantages and limitations of established risk scoring systems and show how artificial intelligence applied on dynamic vital parameter changes, may help to predict critical illness, adverse events and death in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.Machine learning assisted dynamic analysis can improve and give patient-specific prediction in Clinical Decision Support systems that have the potential of reducing both morbidity and mortality. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.