The health division of Wolters Kluwer, a provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, will announce the findings of its study on the impact of real-time clinical surveillance and data analytics on an Alabama hospital’s sepsis mortality rates at the Becker’s Hospital Review 7th Annual Meeting. Stephen Claypool, MD, Medical Director, Clinical Software Solutions at Wolters Kluwer, and Joycelyn Craighead, Director of Quality at Huntsville Hospital, will discuss how the hospital’s use of Wolters Kluwer’s POC Advisor™ generated a 53% reduction in sepsis-related deaths during the 10-month study period. The complete study will appear in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) later this year.
The presentation, “Life-Saving Data: How Integrating Real-time Surveillance and Analytics in Clinical Systems Reduced Sepsis Mortality at Huntsville Hospital,” will take place Friday, April 29 from 4:15-4:55 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.
Sepsis has received increased national attention in recent months with the tragic death of actress Patty Duke and the release of new sepsis definitions and clinical criteria by the Third International Consensus Definitions Task Force. The addition of sepsis to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2016 core measures has further increased the sense of urgency around improving early diagnosis and treatment to bring down the human and financial toll of sepsis, which claims an estimated 258,000 lives and costs more than $20 billion to treat each year in the U.S.
For “Life-Saving Data,” researchers collected sepsis data over the course of 10 months at Huntsville Hospital, a 941-bed facility in Huntsville, Ala., following a five-month implementation phase in which POC Advisor was added into the clinical workflow. Prior to the study, the hospital had a sepsis mortality rate significantly higher than the national average. When re-evaluated at the end of the study, that rate had declined by 53%.
POC Advisor uses automated, real-time surveillance that aggregates, normalizes and analyzes patient data from disparate clinical systems to deliver early sepsis alerts and treatment advice to clinicians via mobile devices and clinical portals. With hundreds of rules built into the platform to account for variables specific to individual patients, including comorbidities and medication abnormalities, POC Advisor ensures that alerts are both highly sensitive and specific.
“Recent events have heightened awareness of sepsis and amplified the need for rapid diagnosis and more effective treatment,” said David A. Del Toro, President & CEO of Clinical Software Solutions at Wolters Kluwer. “Our clinical, informatics and programming experts have worked tirelessly developing POC Advisor into a platform that allows providers to drastically improve how they identify and manage sepsis. The results of our partnership with Huntsville Hospital stand as a testament to our commitment to revolutionize how providers in the U.S. and worldwide improve sepsis outcomes.”
