Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes (IPSO) is successfully challenging sepsis.
Every year, 80,000 children are hospitalized for sepsis in the U.S. Almost 5,000 children die from sepsis, more than from cancer, and 25 percent to 40 percent of those who survive sepsis suffer from long-term health issues.
Why are so many children dying or disabled from sepsis? Sepsis progresses quickly from mild to severe stages, so delays in recognition and treatment have serious consequences. Yet, such delays are common because sepsis can be difficult to diagnose and effective treatment is complex—requiring high levels of coordination.
Improved Outcomes and Care
IPSO aims to reduce mortality from sepsis and improve survivor outcomes by identifying sepsis earlier and initiating more timely treatment. Results from the collaborative’s first two years of data demonstrate IPSO strategies are succeeding:
18%
increase in sepsis patients being recognized
30%
increase in the use of sepsis recognition and diagnostic bundles
10%
decrease in time to first IV antibiotic
10%
decrease in time to first fluid bolus
6%
decrease in hospital days per sepsis episode
15%
decrease in sepsis-related mortality
Effective Sepsis Response Systems
Sepsis is complicated, and requires broad and deep change to systems to meet the challenge. IPSO hospitals are simultaneously driving improvement in diagnostic processes, clinical care, infection prevention, lab, pharmacy, decision support, and data infrastructure—and doing so across multiple settings: ED, PICU, general care, hem/onc and transplant units.
5 Key Processes to Affect Outcomes
IPSO hospitals are focusing on five processes that evidence shows accelerate progress toward reducing mortality and hospital-onset severe sepsis.
- Sepsis screening
- Sepsis huddle
- Order set utilization
- Time to first fluid bolus
- Time to first IV antibiotic
Participation Leads to Improved Data Infrastructure
Collaboration resulted in improved information by:
- Closing gaps in sepsis patient documentation
- Standardizing sepsis documentation and tools
- Addressing sepsis coding inconsistencies
- Accessing data previously fragmented in multiple systems
Collaboration improved EMR capability by:
- Facilitating clinical decision support; e.g., trigger tools, best practice alerts
- Improving EMR documentation
- Automating sepsis data collection
- Shared queries/reports for EPIC, Cerner, etc.
Data Foundational to Measuring Outcomes
Improvement is data-driven. The IPSO data sets rapidly grow as IPSO hospitals create the needed data infrastructure for sepsis recognition and care. With robust data for analysis, IPSO is establishing the first reliable baseline for sepsis incidence and mortality.
44,000
IPSO Sepsis episodes
143,000
IPSO Suspected Infection episodes
187,000
total episodes—largest sepsis
data set in pediatrics
87%
timely data submission