It’s Sepsis-Harassment!

The computer knows all in modern medicine. The electronic health record is the new Big Brother, all-seeing, never un-seeing. And it sees “sepsis” – a lot.

This is a report on the downstream effects of an electronic sepsis alert system at an academic medical center. Their sepsis alert system was based loosely on the systemic inflammatory response syndrome for the initial warning to nursing staff, followed by additional alerts triggered by hypotension or elevated lactate. These alerts prompted use of sepsis order sets or triggering of internal “sepsis alert” protocols. Their outcomes of interest in their analysis were length-of-stay and in-hospital mortality.

At first glance, the alert appears to be a success – length of stay dropped from 10.1 days to 8.6, and in-hospital mortality from 8.5% to 7.0%. It would have been quite simple to stop there and trumpet these results as favoring the alerts, but the additional analyses performed by these authors demonstrate otherwise. In the case of both length-of-stay and mortality, both of those measures were trending downward independently regardless of the intervention, and in their adjusted analyses, none of the improvements could be conclusively tied to the sepsis alerts – and some relating to diagnoses of less-severe cases of sepsis probably prompted by the alert itself.

What is not debatable, however, is the burden on clinicians and staff. During their ~2.5 year study period, the sepsis alerts were triggered 97,216 times – 14,207 of which in the 2,144 subsequently receiving a final diagnosis of sepsis. The SIRS-based alerts comprised most (83,385) of these alerts, but only captured 73% of those with an ultimate diagnosis of sepsis, while having only a 13% true positive rate. The authors’ conclusion gets it right:

Our results suggest that more sophisticated approaches to early identification of sepsis patients are needed to consistently improve patient outcomes.

“Impact of an emergency department electronic sepsis surveillance system on patient mortality and length of stay”
https://academic.oup.com/jamia/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jamia/ocx072/4096536/Impact-of-an-emergency-department-electronic