Protocol to assess performance of crisis standards of care guidelines for clinical triage.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, US states developed Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) algorithms to triage allocation of scarce resources to maximize population-wide benefit. While CSC algorithms were developed by ethical debate, this protocol guides their quantitative assessment. For CSC algorithms, this protocol addresses (1) adapting algorithms for empirical study, (2) quantifying predictive accuracy, and (3) simulating clinical decision-making. This protocol provides a framework for healthcare systems and governments to test the performance of CSC algorithms to ensure they meet their stated ethical goals. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Jezmir et al. (2021).
Competing Interests: The authors have no disclosures or conflicts of interest relevant to this work. In unrelated disclosures, E.Y.K. is a co-investigator in NCT04389671 (Windtree Therapeutics) testing lucinactant (surfactant-like treatment) in COVID-19 patients. E.Y.K. received unrelated research funding from Bayer, the US National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Thoracic Society.
(© 2021 The Author(s).)