Infection & Sepsis Risk score Moderate evidence Clinical review pending v1.0.0

qSOFA (quick SOFA)

Is a patient with suspected infection at higher risk of a poor outcome?

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About this tool

Three bedside criteria identifying adults with suspected infection at higher risk of death outside the ICU.

Intended use

Adults with suspected infection outside the ICU — a prognostic prompt, not a diagnostic tool.

Outcome

In-hospital mortality

Time horizon

Hospital stay

Derivation population

Large US and German electronic health record cohorts (Sepsis-3).

Limitations

Low sensitivity as a screening tool.
Not a criterion for the diagnosis of sepsis.

Clinical problems

Pneumonia and sepsis

Evidence

Evidence level

Moderate evidence

Widely validated prognostically, but guidelines recommend against using it alone for screening. Methodology

Guideline status

Introduced with Sepsis-3 (2016); the Surviving Sepsis Campaign 2021 recommends against qSOFA as a single screening tool.

Discrimination

AUROC 0.81 for in-hospital mortality outside the ICU in the Sepsis-3 validation cohort.

Evidence summaries for this tool are awaiting independent clinical review. Statistics are shown only where they could be attributed to a specific publication.

References

Original publicationSeymour CW, Liu VX, Iwashyna TJ, et al. Assessment of Clinical Criteria for Sepsis: For the Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3). JAMA 2016;315:762-774. Find on PubMed (opens in a new tab)
GuidelineEvans L, Rhodes A, Alhazzani W, et al. Surviving Sepsis Campaign: International Guidelines for Management of Sepsis and Septic Shock 2021. Crit Care Med 2021;49:e1063-e1143. Find on PubMed (opens in a new tab)

Version history

Version	Formula	Effective	Reviewer	Changes
v1.0.0	Seymour 2016	2026-10-03	—	Initial implementation with reference test vectors.

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