Clinical Decision Support Reduces Sepsis Mortality in AL

As part of an electronic surveillance program, clinical decision support assisted to decrease the sepsis mortality by 53%.

A pair of clinical informaticist consultants found clinical decision support (CDS) systems to have a positive effect on identifying instances of sepsis and decreasing sepsis mortality at an Alabama hospital.

According to the research published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the combination of a computerized surveillance algorithm and CDS tools amounted to 53 percent fewer deaths per 1000 cases (i.e., 40 deaths) as compared to the control group with 90 deaths each 1000 cases. When identifying sepsis identification more widely using IDC-9 codes, the previous figure dropped to a still significant 41% lower mortality.

"We consider that the highly accurate alerts (sensitive and specific) in the system designed for this study minimized alert fatigue, permitting optimal clinician utilization of the system, and, when combined with the timely detection of sepsis allowed by the system, resulted in the positive outcome of significantly reduced sepsis mortality in the study population," concluded Sharad Manaktala and Stephen Claypool of Wolters Kluwer Health.