Status of trauma patient management as measured by survival/death outcomes: looking toward the 21st century.

Since the focus of trauma care is to improve survival and norms have been established through large database studies to evaluate outcomes, the Relative Outcome Score provides a method to gauge treatment outcomes against perfection, on an ongoing basis, as long as baseline and severity mixes are standardized. The ROS will probably never reach 1.0 and may eventually plateau as treatment abilities are maximized for trauma patients, but the ROS does at least provide a measure to compare with the past, present and future.