White Paper
Improving Sepsis Outcomes through Earlier Recognition
Summary
Sepsis is a leading cause of hospital mortality and major patient safety priority. Although early identification of septic patients is critical to improving outcomes, identifying sepsis is notoriously difficult. Existing tools, from simple SIRS checklists to sophisticated EMR-based algorithms are not up to the task, as they tend to suffer from impractically high numbers of false positives.
PeraHealth takes a different approach – focusing on the patient rather than the disease. Using the Rothman Index and PeraTrend to capture patient deterioration in real-time, including the deterioration that typically accompanies sepsis progression, PeraHealth can provide clinicians with earlier warning of patients who may be septic.
Authors: PeraHealth, Inc.
Clinical care redesigns that included PeraTrend have helped Yale New Haven Health’s Bridgeport Hospital and Houston Methodist Hospital achieve significant improvements in sepsis mortality and costs.
Patients flagged by the RI are in need of attention – in practice this translates to a meaningful reduction in false positives even when warnings flag patients who are not septic.