Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Automated, electronic monitoring for early detection of sepsis

Introduction

Early detection of sepsis is important for a sufficient treatment to reduce mortality. We hypothesized that using modified systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria over 1 hour using an electronic software program facilitates the clinical diagnosis of sepsis.

Methods

After IRB approval and informed consent we enrolled in this prospective, observational, single-center study 1,119 consecutive patients (age 68.6 ± 16.4, female/male 476/649) admitted over a 6-month period to a surgical ICU. A total 149 of them met modified systemic inflammatory response criteria. Patients were monitored by an electronic software program using live data from the laboratory and bedside monitors to detect modified systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria persisting over 1 hour. The physicians were blinded to the software program alerts that notified in real time when modified systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria were detected and persisted over 1 hour, but did not provide treatment recommendations.

Results

There was a total of 149 modified systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria alerts. Seventy-four were confirmed as true sepsis cases by physicians. The overall incidence of sepsis was 7%. Patients were categorized into length of stay <24 hours, 24 to 96 hours and >96 hours. The overall sensitivity of our system for detecting sepsis was 68% and the specificity was 91%. The positive predictive value is 34% and the negative predictive value is 98%.

Conclusion

Real-time alerts using an automated, electronic monitoring of modified systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria facilitate the clinical diagnosis of sepsis.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Rauch, S., Fischer, M., Martin, C. et al. Automated, electronic monitoring for early detection of sepsis. Crit Care 17 (Suppl 2), P519 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc12457

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/cc12457

Keywords