Abstract

BACKGROUND: Sepsis remains the top cause of morbidity and mortality of hospitalised patients despite concerted efforts. Clinical decision support for sepsis has shown mixed results reflecting heterogeneous populations, methodologies and interventions.OBJECTIVES: To determine whether the addition of a real-time electronic health record (EHR)-based clinical decision support alert improves adherence to treatment guidelines and clinical outcomes in hospitalised patients with suspected severe sepsis.DESIGN: Patient-level randomisation, single blinded.SETTING: Medical and surgical inpatient units of an academic, tertiary care medical centre.PATIENTS: 1123 adults over the age of 18 admitted to inpatient wards (intensive care units (ICU) excluded) at an academic teaching hospital between November 2014 and March 2015.INTERVENTIONS: Patients were randomised to either usual care or the addition of an EHR-generated alert in response to a set of modified severe sepsis criteria that included vital signs, laboratory values and physician orders.MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: There was no significant difference between the intervention and control groups in primary outcome of the percentage of patients with new antibiotic orders at 3hours after the alert (35% vs 37%, p=0.53). There was no difference in secondary outcomes of in-hospital mortality at 30 days, length of stay greater than 72hours, rate of transfer to ICU within 48hours of alert, or proportion of patients receiving at least 30mL/kg of intravenous fluids.CONCLUSIONS: An EHR-based severe sepsis alert did not result in a statistically significant improvement in several sepsis treatment performance measures.

View details for PubMedID 30872387