SAPS II was designed to measure the severity of disease for patients admitted to Intensive care units aged 18 or more.
24 hours after admission to the ICU, the measurement has been completed and resulted in an integer point score between 0 and 163 and a predicted mortality between 0% and 100%.
If a patient is discharged from the ICU and readmitted, a new SAPS II score can be calculated.
In contrast to APACHE II, the resulting value is much better at comparing patients with different diseases [citation needed].
The main purpose of this calculation is to provide a value that can be averaged for a group of patients, since it gives very unprecise values to calculate an average of the scores of a group of patients [citation needed].