Patients with sepsis are more likely to survive the life-threatening, costly condition when they are treated in a hospital that has a higher volume of sepsis cases, according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
A bacterial infection anywhere in the body could lead to sepsis. The condition is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it costs the nation's health system about $24 billion annually.
This study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, looked at hospital admissions from 2004 to 2010 among 914,000 patients with severe sepsis. Researchers found an inverse relationship between severe sepsis case volume and inpatient mortality for both urban and rural hospitals. Overall, the in-hospital mortality rate was 28 percent, but patients treated in hospitals that saw 500 or more cases per year had better odds of survival (a 36 percent increase) compared with patients treated in hospitals that have less than 50 cases each year.
"Early diagnoses and treatment are key to surviving sepsis and it may be that physicians at hospitals that see a larger volume of patients with severe sepsis are more attuned to these non-specific symptoms and have put protocols in place to aid the detection of these critically ill patients," said David F. Gaieski, MD, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Penn and the study's lead author.
The study's results "provide preliminary support" for the theory that sepsis patients could benefit from receiving treatment from high-volume specialty centers, similar to stroke centers or trauma centers, according to Dr. Gaieski.