The Tradeoff IT Shouldn’t Have to Make
Every hospital IT leader has heard some version of this pitch: a new clinical system that promises to transform patient care, if IT can find the months of engineering time to build and maintain yet another integration. That tradeoff, faster clinical response versus IT bandwidth, is usually where these projects stall.
It’s also the wrong tradeoff to be making. National SEP-1 bundle of care compliance sits at 64%, a gap with real consequences for patients and for the Medicare reimbursement CMS ties to sepsis performance under Value-Based Purchasing (VBP). Clinical teams feel that gap directly. But closing it shouldn’t require IT to take on a system that competes for the same limited resources as everything else on their roadmap.
That’s the real question worth asking about any new clinical technology: not just what it does for patients, but what it asks of the team responsible for building, securing, and maintaining it.
Why DART Doesn’t Predict, It Presents
DART doesn’t forecast future risk. It flags a patient once they meet hospital-defined clinical sepsis criteria, a current clinical presentation, not a probability. That distinction matters operationally as much as clinically: a predictive alert leaves clinicians questioning how to intervene on a patient that will develop sepsis, maybe, in the future. DART brings a patient to a clinician’s attention when they can be intervened on, now.
Once a patient is flagged, the notification goes out in real time, typically within seconds, through the communication platforms hospitals already run:
- Vocera
- TigerConnect
- symplr
- Text messaging
- EHR notifications (OPAs, Discern Alerts, etc.)
- Desktop notifications
Nobody has to be logged into the EMR to see it, and nobody has to guess what happens next.
Built With Your IT Team, Not Around Them
Integration is usually the first concern hospital IT raises about a new clinical system, and it’s a fair one. A poorly scoped integration can mean months of custom development and an open-ended maintenance commitment for a team that’s already stretched across a dozen other priorities.
DART is designed to be flexible enough to utilize the EMR feeds hospitals already have, rather than asking IT to stand up net-new feeds. While the occasional datapoint may need to be added to an existing feed, DART generally consumes a hospital’s existing EMR data feeds and manages any needed transforms on their end, all to align with the goal of making the lift on your IT Team as light as possible. Typical implementation runs around four months from kickoff to go-live.
“Hospital IT teams are already stretched thin, so we built our integration process to work with what they have instead of adding another heavy lift to their plate. From day one, the goal is to minimize the effort on their team so they can stay focused on everything else they’re already managing.”
— Derek Woolley, Director of Enterprise Implementations and Client Success, Ambient Clinical Analytics
Complementary, Not Competitive
DART isn’t asking a hospital to choose between its EMR and a surveillance tool. It works inside the systems already in place, Epic, Oracle Health, Meditech, extending what those systems can already do rather than duplicating or replacing them. For IT teams weighing vendor risk, that’s the difference between adding a new clinical tool to the environment and adding a new burden to it.
The Bottom Line
A well-designed sepsis protocol only works if it’s actually followed, and that depends on more than clinical logic. It depends on whether the technology behind it respects the team responsible for keeping it running. DART is built to notify care teams in real time, inside the tools they already use, on a timeline and integration model that doesn’t ask IT to rebuild what’s already working.
Want to see how Sepsis DART fits into your hospital’s existing EMR and IT environment? Contact our team or request a demo.
Key Takeaways
- National SEP-1 compliance sits at 64%, and that number has direct implications for CMS VBP reimbursement.
- Sepsis DART™ is indicative, not predictive. It flags a patient once they meet hospital-defined sepsis clinical criteria, not a future risk score.
- DART notifies the care team in real time, typically within seconds, through the communication tools hospitals already use.
- DART works inside major EMR platforms, including Epic, Oracle Health, and Meditech, with existing data feeds, rather than replacing them.
- Typical implementation runs around four months from kickoff to go-live.
