Hospital and EMS Benefits of Prehospital Sepsis Alerts

We know that sepsis is a significant and frequent cause of hospitalization, and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of admissions and deaths annually in the United States.1,2 We also know that the treatment of sepsis and septic shock accounts for a huge financial burden to the healthcare system, with an annual cost approaching $20 billion.3,4 One driving factor in this huge financial liability is the length of stay (LOS) of these patients, which is reported as 75% longer for patients admitted with sepsis than those with other conditions.3 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has therefore prioritized improvement of sepsis care by adopting specific sepsis and infection control measures. The National Quality Forum created the “Early Management Bundle for Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock” measure as part of the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (Hospital IQR) program in 2015. The early identification and treatment of sepsis has been shown to improve outcomes and potentially reduce LOS.5 The bundle measure was created to encourage this evidence-based approach. These bundle measures are meant to drive improvement in the quality of patient care by tying reimbursement to the completion of specific guidelines thought to improve outcomes. In this case, the CMS measure aligns hospital reimbursements with Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines.5 Through this sometimes controversial approach, hospitals are incentivized monetarily to provide appropriate clinical ca...
Source: JEMS Patient Care - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Patient Care Source Type: news