Very intriguing. The intersection of math disciplines appears to be a problem when one discipline is poorly defined (or poorly definable) with the extant math. Imagine if that was true at the intersection of the physical sciences and engineering science.
This is why the burden falls on the statisticians because clinicians are deriving VERY simple functions. Very little of clinical medicine is math.
With a little due dilligence, these simple functions are very easy for a statistician to understand and factor. I could teach them to a math undergrad student in 15 minutes. This is not true for the statisticians who are using complex math, substantially the the entire discipline being math.
So if a clinician researcher says she wants to use SOFA chances are, she does not know the function SOFA is intended (but fails) to render.
A statistician should not connect a perceived function as a measure in an RCT to statistical math without understanding the function’s derivation, behavior and reproducibility.
There was a improper joke I saw an internist play on a surgeon when I was student.
After taking a history and examining the patient he drew a line on a patient’s abdomen over the gall bladder and next to it he wrote “Cut Here”. Now, of course, no diligent surgeon would comply without her own investigation.
When applying statistics to a measurement like SOFA, statisticans are, without due diligence, dutifully “cutting here”.