{"id":15098,"date":"2018-02-22T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T17:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/2018\/02\/22\/synergy-between-nurses-and-automation-could-be-key-to-finding-sepsis-early\/"},"modified":"2018-02-22T17:40:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T17:40:00","slug":"synergy-between-nurses-and-automation-could-be-key-to-finding-sepsis-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/synergy-between-nurses-and-automation-could-be-key-to-finding-sepsis-early\/","title":{"rendered":"Synergy Between Nurses And Automation Could Be Key To Finding Sepsis Early"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Richard Harris<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n Rosemary Grant is a registered nurse and helps coordinate sepsis care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. The center’s goal, she says, is to get a patient who might be developing sepsis antibiotics within three hours.<\/p>\n

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Ian C. Bates for NPR<\/p>\n

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Ian C. Bates for NPR<\/p>\n

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A quarter of a million Americans die every year from sepsis, which is the body’s reaction to overwhelming infection. This cascade of organ failure can be nipped in the bud if health care workers know it’s ramping up, but that’s often not easy to do.<\/p>\n

“Sepsis is a really frustrating disease,” says Dr. David Carlbom<\/a>, a critical care pulmonologist, and medical director of the sepsis program at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “There’s no blood test for sepsis,” he says. “There’s nothing you can look at under the microscope and say ‘this is sepsis.’ “<\/p>\n

So a few years ago, Carlbom set out to devise a system that uses more subtle clues from a patient’s day-to-day electronic health records to send up warning flags of impending sepsis.<\/p>\n

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The automated system looks for patterns in symptoms like high temperature, low temperature, low blood pressure, fast breathing and high white-blood-cell counts. No single symptom signals sepsis, but certain patterns suggest this condition could be emerging.<\/p>\n

Rosemary Grant, a registered nurse who coordinates sepsis care at Harborview, explains how it works as we stand at a nursing station in the hospital.<\/p>\n

The previous day, a red box appeared on a computer screen next to the name of a patient who had been hospitalized for several weeks following a motorcycle accident. The computer prompted the nurse responsible for that patient to assess whether his constellation of symptoms was an early sign of sepsis.<\/p>\n

“If the nurse says yes, then the provider is automatically paged, out of the computer system,” Grant says.<\/p>\n