Scott JW, Staudenmayer K, Sangji N, et al. - A heterogeneous population of acutely ill patients is involved in emergency general surgery (EGS), and there is a necessity for standardized methods for assessing disease severity for comparative effectiveness research and quality improvement initiatives. A grading system has been developed by the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST) for the anatomic severity of 16 EGS conditions; however, there is little understanding concerning how well these AAST EGS grades can be approximated by diagnosis codes in administrative databases. They identified a total of 10,886,822 adults admitted for 16 common EGS conditions in the 2012 to 2017q3 National Inpatient Sample. Findings support the feasibility of performing classification of common EGS conditions according to anatomic severity with International Classification of Diseases codes. No condition mapped to five different severity grades, and there was no consistency of the correlation between increasing grade and outcomes across conditions. However, a standardized measure of severity, even if just dichotomized into less vs more complex, can inform ongoing efforts aimed at optimizing outcomes for EGS patients across the nation.