Assessment of heart rate, acidosis, consciousness, oxygenation, and respiratory rate to predict noninvasive ventilation failure in hypoxemic patients

The failure rate of NIV was 47.8 and 39.4% in the test and validation cohorts, respectively. In the test cohort, patients with NIV failure had higher HACOR scores at initiation and after 1, 12, 24, and 48 h of NIV than those with successful NIV. At 1 h of NIV the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.88, showing good predictive power for NIV failure. Using 5 points as the cutoff value, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and diagnostic accuracy for NIV failure were 72.6, 90.2, 87.2, 78.1, and 81.8%, respectively. These results were confirmed in the validation cohort. Moreover, the diagnostic accuracy for NIV failure exceeded 80% in subgroups classified by diagnosis, age, or disease severity and also at 1, 12, 24, and 48 h of NIV. Among patients with NIV failure with a HACOR score of >5 at 1 h of NIV, hospital mortality was lower in those who received intubation at ≤12 h of NIV than in those intubated later [58/88 (66%) vs. 138/175 (79%); p = 0.03).