An official from Houston Methodist Hospital shared lessons learned from the organizations' sepsis care improvement initiative implementation in the March 2016 edition of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
The article was authored by Stephen L. Jones, MD, an assistant clinical member of the Houston Methodist Research Institute, and his colleagues. According to Dr. Jones, the Sepsis Early Recognition and Response Initiative, or SERRI, was implemented at Houston Methodist Hospital and 14 other facilities in the Texas Gulf Coast Sepsis Network.
SERRI was designed in response to CMS' new requirement that demands hospitals report their performance on a composite process of care measure for severe sepsis and septic shock in 2016.
To help meet CMS' requirements, the site-specific implementation incorporated four key elements of SERRI:
1. Engaging hospital leaders
2. Educating bedside nurses and second responders
3. Incorporating a five-item bedside systemic inflammatory response system and sepsis screening tool into EHR systems
4. Auditing and collecting feedback using process and outcome data
The elements were modified to accommodate differences across the 15 facilities in their missions, staffing levels, clinical processes and medical record systems.
By January 2015, all but two of the acute care SERRI sites were screening more than 80 percent of inpatients whose stay was sepsis-associated. Additionally, screening for patients with sepsis-associated stays reached 89 percent to 98 percent in post-acute care sites. The two sites that hadn't reached such levels of screening didn't joined the initiative until mid-2014.
More articles on sepsis:
Sepsis redefined: JAMA articles update guidance for the first time since 2001
What to expect in the sepsis therapeutics market: 5 findings and forecasts
The keys to combating sepsis: Change management processes and decision-support tools