Summary
Summary: To conduct an independent secondary analysis of a multi-focal intervention for early
detection of sepsis that included implementation of change management strategies,
electronic surveil-lance for sepsis, and evidence based point of care alerting using
the POC AdvisorTM application. Methods: Propensity score matching was used to select subsets of the cohorts with balanced
covariates. Bootstrapping was performed to build distributions of the measured difference
in rates/ means. The effect of the sepsis intervention was evaluated for all patients,
and High and Low Risk subgroups for illness severity. A separate analysis was performed
patients on the intervention and non-intervention units (without the electronic surveillance).
Sensitivity, specificity, and the positive predictive values were calculated to evaluate
the accuracy of the alerting system for detecting sepsis or severe sepsis/ septic
shock.
Results: There was positive effect on the intervention units with sepsis electronic surveillance
with an adjusted mortality rate of –6.6%. Mortality rates for non-intervention units
also improved, but at a lower rate of –2.9%. Additional outcomes improved for patients
on both intervention and non-intervention units for home discharge (7.5% vs 1.1%),
total length of hospital stay (-0.9% vs –0.3%), and 30 day readmissions (-6.6% vs
–1.6%). Patients on the intervention units showed better outcomes compared with non-intervention
unit patients, and even more so for High Risk patients. The sensitivity was 95.2%,
specificity of 82.0% and PPV of 50.6% for the electronic surveillance alerts. Conclusion: There was improvement over time across the hospital for patients on the intervention
and non-intervention units with more improvement for sicker patients. Patients on
intervention units with electronic surveillance have better outcomes; however, due
to differences in exclusion criteria and types of units, further study is needed to
draw a direct relationship between the electronic surveillance system and outcomes.
Keywords
Sepsis - clinical decision support - electronic surveillance - sepsis outcomes - informatics