Table 2.

Evaluating Predictive Model for Severe Sepsis [From Shapiro et al⁸]

Evaluation Criteria	Result
Appropriate Study Population	Population consisted of patients > 18 years presenting to the ED at an urban, academic teaching hospital with 50,000 visits annually
Inclusion of regression coefficients and regression constant	The proper coefficient and intercept were reported in the results
Description of variable coding and selection	There was adequate description of the variables in the model. Variables were eligible for inclusion into a forward selection model at a level of p<0.1. Presence of a dichotomous variable was coded as “1” and absence as “0.”
Effect modification reporting	Effect modification and interactions were not mentioned in the article.
Goodness of fit and Validation of the model	Goodness of fit was assessed using Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test. Validation of the model was done by the bootstrap method as well as creating a separate validation set to test the final model created from the derivation set.
Overfitting	Also assessed using the bootstrap method. There were greater than 10 events per independent variable
Nonconformity to a linear gradient	Not mentioned in the article, and often difficult to assess.