TUESDAY, Dec. 3, 2019 (HealthDay News) — A digital sepsis alert is associated with improved outcomes, according to a study published online Nov. 20 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Kate Honeyford, Ph.D., from Imperial College London, and colleagues compared the phased introduction (without randomization) of a digital sepsis alert into a multisite hospital network. In the intervention group, sepsis alerts were visible to clinicians, while they were running silently and not visible in the control group. Mortality, length of hospital stays, and timely antibiotics were compared between the two groups.
The researchers found that the introduction of the alert was associated with lower odds of death (odds ratio, 0.76); lower odds of prolonged hospital stay of at least seven days (odds ratio, 0.93); and in patients who required antibiotics, increased odds of receiving timely antibiotics (odds ratio, 1.71).
“These findings strongly suggest that the introduction of a network-wide digital sepsis alert is associated with improvements in patient outcomes, demonstrating that digital based interventions can be successfully introduced and readily evaluated,” the authors write.
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