Loading...
Numerous models exist to assist physicians in early identification of patients with sepsis, but none have been adopted uniformly. Commercial electronic medical record vendors, such as EPIC, have promoted their sepsis models as effective early warning tools, and they are used by many hospitals. In this study of 38,000 hospitalizations in the University of Michigan healthcare system, researchers examined the effectiveness of EPIC's sepsis model.
According to standard criteria, the prevalence of sepsis in this cohort was 7% (2552 patients). The EPIC model missed 67% of these sepsis cases. Additionally, EPIC sepsis alerts were issued for nearly 7000 patients, but the positive predictive value of an alert was only 12%; in other words, the vast ma…