In a new paper, Ahead of Admission: Exploring Pre-Hospitalization Health Care Encounters in Sepsis Patients, HQI takes a unique approach to sepsis analysis.
Rather than the traditional method of evaluating post-discharge outcomes and in-hospital interventions, HQI adapted the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ condition-specific readmission methodology to identify emergency department visits and inpatient hospitalizations that preceded index admissions identified as sepsis cases.
HQI’s analysis is promising, identifying a higher incidence of pre-sepsis organ dysfunction encounters than pre-sepsis septicemia encounters. While this suggests that organ dysfunction could be an early warning signal for sepsis, the data also suggests that a large proportion of pre-sepsis encounters involved neither septicemia nor organ dysfunction. A follow-up analysis will work to uncover the other early indicators that could help clinicians diagnose sepsis sooner and improve patient outcomes.
