[The value of scores for therapy planning and therapy evaluation in individual intensive care patients--basic principles].

The utility of scoring systems in intensive care and emergency medicine has been approved for the classification of severity of diseases, quality assurance and cost performance of patient groups. There are obvious methodological pitfalls in using probabilities of mortality, which are estimates of risk of death, to predict specific outcomes for individual patients. They can only be used as a supplement to clinical decision making. Use of daily scoring systems can help in the description of the disease course of patients under treatment (trend analysis).