Interview with Dr. Murray Pollack, the Director of Outcomes Research at the Children’s National Medical Center and Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. Severity of illness research probably started with Virginia Apgar, at least in the modern era. She was the first person to quantify physiologic status for patients– in this case, it was newborns. The second group that used severity of illness for quantifying physiologic status was, of course, Jennett and Teasdale, when they developed the Glasgow Coma Scale score. That was remarkable because that score had so much content validity that it was actually used before it’s full validation had been published. It became a worldwide standard, even without statistical validation.

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