Sepsis is a significant challenge for hospitals and is the leading cause of hospital mortality, impacting patient outcomes and hospital finances. Sepsis is a life-threatening response to infection that often leads to tissue damage, amputations, organ failure, and death. This condition requires swift action and coordinated care, and the right sepsis solution transforms how hospitals detect, treat, and manage sepsis.
This article is focused on exploring automating the CMS defined Sep-1sepsis bundle in advanced sepsis solutions. Accurate detection of sepsis is challenging, and delivering the appropriate sepsis bundle elements is even more burdensome, resulting in roughly half of septic patients in the U.S. receiving timely and correct treatment. This is mostly due to the complexity of the spies bundle and clinicians missing the timeline for treatment because they don’t have the correct sepsis solution in place. This highlights the urgent need to move away from EHRs to advanced sepsis solutions to improve detection and treatment outcomes.
Sepsis occurs when the body’s immune response to an infection becomes overactive, causing widespread inflammation that can damage tissues and organs. If untreated, sepsis can lead to septic shock, amputations, organ failure, and death. It’s a critical condition and one of the leading causes of hospital deaths globally. Addressing this condition effectively demands clinical expertise and a well-designed sepsis solution. Sepsis affects millions of people annually, with many requiring intensive care. Early-stage sepsis can be treated effectively but delays in detection or care significantly increase mortality rates. Treating sepsis is costly to the patient, often involving extended ICU stays and advanced interventions.
What is a Sepsis Bundle?
A sepsis bundle is a defined set of actions that should be delivered within a specific timeframe based on the patient’s condition. The concept of a "bundle" in healthcare is designed to help providers remember complex guidelines by consolidating them into a manageable set of critical steps. They are intended to standardize care, reduce variability in treatment practices, and ensure that all patients receive the most effective interventions promptly. The CMS SEP-1 sepsis bundle is a complex protocol because certain elements are only required if certain patient conditions are met. Using an FDA Class II approved sepsis solution aids in making sure the proper elements of care are delivered.
Since 2018, hospitals have been reporting CMS SEP-1, sepsis bundle compliance via the Inpatient Quality Program. In 2024, with its addition to the Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program in the Safety Domain, there are not only quality ramifications for hospitals and health systems, but there are also financial penalty implications for CFOs that are tied to your hospital's sepsis performance. With sepsis now a critical measure in the VBP program, it's crucial to utilize a sepsis solution that optimizes workflows for clinical excellence and financial success by furnishing your clinical teams with sepsis solutions that substantially improve outcomes and compliance.
Many hospitals executives are just learning what their clinical teams already know, which is their current shortfalls and approach to sepsis workflows via the EHR don’t deliver the care and efficiency required to be impactful. Because of over-reliance on EHRs, IT departments are moving away from EHRs and poor performing sepsis workflows. Effective sepsis management requires collaboration among various healthcare professionals. In essence, the CMS Sep-1, sepsis bundle codified into an advanced sepsis solution delivers a comprehensive sepsis workflow that guides providers to deliver timely care and the evidence-based sepsis bundle to septic patients. Promoting a systematic and automated approach to sepsis bundle compliance using a sepsis solution that accounts for human breakdowns in care improves patient outcomes.
Hospital’s Challenges with Sepsis
Sepsis is a fast-moving condition with vague symptoms, making it difficult to diagnose early. These challenges underline the need for an optimized sepsis workflow integrating advanced sepsis solutions to address detection, treatment, and ongoing care. Advanced sepsis solutions deliver clear and timely information on a patient’s condition to the doctor or nurse.
Hospitals face several challenges:
- Delayed Diagnosis: Symptoms of sepsis are often missed, such as fever and confusion, often mimic other conditions, leading to missed or delayed detection.
- High Stakes: Delays in treatment increase the likelihood of septic shock, organ failure, amputation, and death.
- Resource Demands: Sepsis patients often require intensive care, which can significantly strains hospital resources, including beds and care teams.
A sepsis workflow is a structured process to help healthcare teams identify, diagnose, and treat sepsis efficiently. It ensures timely intervention and compliance with clinical guidelines, reducing complications and mortality rates. An optimized sepsis workflow improves patient outcomes and enhances operational efficiency and resource utilization.
Critical Components of a Sepsis Workflow
- Screening and Detection: Using tools and protocols to identify at-risk patients early.
- Treatment Initiation: Promptly administer bundle elements such as fluids, antibiotics, and other evidence-based treatments.
- Ongoing Monitoring: Tracking patient treatment progress and adjusting as needed.
Sepsis Solutions Enhance the Workflow
The development in sepsis solutions, specifically over the past three years, has hurdled the previous 30 years. An advanced and effective sepsis solution automates early detection of sepsis and other conditions, providing smart notifications, patient monitoring, and treatment bundle reminders to ensure timely care and help eliminate errors or missing sepsis bundle elements. With the appropriate sepsis solution, you can automatically detect sepsis, rapidly deliver timely treatment that dramatically improves sepsis bundle compliance while reducing mortality. EHRs consolidate a patient’s medical history and all data into one place for billing purposes. Effective sepsis solutions integrated into EHR workflows making it easy for doctors and nurses to diagnose the patient’s condition quickly and treat them appropriately.
Sepsis solutions begin by recognizing that sepsis is present in an individual. An advanced sepsis solution collects data in real time and helps identify which patients are more likely to struggle with a condition using indicative, AI, and machine learning algorithms. Algorithms create more insight and notify doctors of early signs of sepsis and other conditions. With advancements in algorithm sensitivity and specificity, you can reduce false alerts and alert fatigue for your physicians and nurses. Alarm fatigue can have serious consequences for both staff and patient outcomes. With EHR based sepsis management, providers are constantly being bombarded with alerts that don’t provide value to them, they lose trust in the solution and become less likely to act when they receive a sepsis alert, even if it is an accurate indication of sepsis. This can lead to missed opportunities for early intervention and poor patient outcomes. In addition, the constant stream of alerts can be stressful and overwhelming for staff, which negatively impacts their well-being and job performance.
Automation of required sepsis bundle elements is paramount following a sepsis alert. Most sepsis solutions do not have this functionality. Nurses and physicians feel a sense of responsibility to provide the best possible care to patients and may feel frustrated if they believe that the hospital is not properly equipped to manage sepsis cases. For doctors and nurses, poor performance on sepsis care can result in feelings of frustration, guilt, and burnout. They may feel that they have failed to provide the best possible care for their patients.
The sepsis bundle includes timely administration of antibiotics, fluid resuscitation, and other critical interventions based on the patient's clinical condition. Advanced sepsis solutions follow the sepsis bundle protocol through monitoring a patients care beyond sepsis bundle compliance. Today, most sepsis solutions don’t have an operative way to notify physicians or nurses when a bundle element timeline is about to expire and no way to escalate if notifications are not acted upon. Good sepsis solutions do this automatically and more importantly, accurately. For decades, health systems and hospitals have attempted to build sepsis bundles into their EHR workflows. These builds have been mostly manual and predominately discontinued because of the manual nature and extremely high labor costs in exchange for very modest improvements in the delivery of care. This underscores why it is so essential to move to an advanced sepsis solution that’s visually integrated into EHR workflows. Advanced sepsis solutions automatically drive care without increased labor costs, deliver meaningful efficiencies in sepsis care and the CMS Sep-1 sepsis bundle delivery. Advanced sepsis solutions integrate seamlessly into the workflow, addressing fundamental challenges and driving efficiency.
Early Detection and Real-Time Alerts Drives Efficiency & ROI
Sepsis solutions use advanced algorithms to monitor vital signs, lab results, and other clinical indicators, providing real-time notifications for potential sepsis cases. This early detection enables faster intervention, which is critical to preventing the progression of severe sepsis or septic shock by prioritizing high-risk patients and ensuring that resources are allocated effectively.
Sepsis solutions streamline processes by automating key steps, significantly reducing the burden on clinicians while enhancing staff satisfaction. These systems prioritize and simplify alerts, reduce alarm fatigue by ensuring notifications are actionable and easy to understand. Workflow automation handles documentation and protocol adherence tasks, ensuring compliance without adding to workloads. With user-friendly EHR interfaces, sepsis solutions minimize training time and drive adoption. By fostering efficient workflows, hospitals retain skilled staff, reduce burnout, and maintain high standards of patient care.
Early detection reduces the need for prolonged ICU stays, significantly lowering treatment costs. By ensuring compliance with clinical guidelines, sepsis solutions help avoid costly CMS penalties. Hospitals that adopt advanced sepsis solutions see measurable savings, including reduced lengths of stay, fewer complications, and better resource use.
An optimized sepsis workflow powered by an advanced sepsis solution is essential for addressing the challenges of managing this life-threatening condition. It ensures every patient receives timely, evidence-based care while enhancing staff efficiency and hospital operations. Early detection and intervention improve patient outcomes, significantly reducing mortality rates. Streamlined workflows save time, minimize resource strain, and maintain compliance with sepsis bundle requirements, protecting the hospital’s reputation and avoiding regulatory penalties. Hospitals can deliver superior patient care by implementing a robust sepsis workflow, achieving financial and operational stability.
Conclusion
Sepsis is a critical, time-sensitive condition that requires swift, coordinated action. With the help of an advanced sepsis solution and an optimized sepsis workflow, hospitals will detect and treat sepsis earlier, saving lives, reducing costs, and avoiding financial penalties.
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Ambient has developed solutions to common barriers and built powerful new solutions that accelerate innovation at the bedside, nurses station, in tele-ICU & acute care command centers, and for remote patient monitoring. These initiatives include impactful advancements in the tele-ICU, acute care, and with detection and response tools for clinical conditions like sepsis that patients may face while in the care of a hospital or health system.
