A study focused on the repercussions of New York enacting mandatory sepsis reporting regulations shows a significant increase in the number of sepsis cases being reported to the state's clinical database.
Researchers published their findings in Critical Care Medicine. They compared cases reported to the New York State Department of Health Sepsis Clinical Database with discharge records in the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System database. In all, 111,816 cases were reported to state's clinical database.
Researchers found the percentage of cases reported increased from 67.5 percent in the first quarter to 81.3 percent in the final quarter of the study, a 13.8 percent increase. They also found the reported cases had higher rates of acute organ dysfunction and higher in-hospital cases as compared to unreported cases.
"Incomplete reporting appears to be driven more by under recognition than attempts to game the system, with minimal bias to risk-adjusted hospital performance measurement," study authors concluded.