Precision medicine and the impact of digital alerts for sepsis

Sepsis is recognized as a common cause of serious illness and death worldwide and contributes to 46,000 deaths in England each year. Sepsis is recognized by World Health Organization as a global health priority. Many countries have nationwide sepsis action plans, and in England, there are targets for hospitals to rapidly diagnose and treat patients with sepsis.

Dr Céire Costelloe, NIHR ARC NWL Digital Health Theme Lead, Senior Lecturer and Director Global Digital Health unit at Imperial College London, led a study to determine the impact of a digital sepsis alert on patient outcomes in locally within Imperial College Healthcare trust. The aims of this study were to determine the effect of the introduction of a digital sepsis alert on 1) key process measure (timely antibiotics); and 2) patient outcomes (extended Length of stat and in-patient 30-day mortality).

Improved outcomes

The introduction of the alert was associated with lower odds of death, lower odds of prolonged hospital stay ≥7 days, and in patients who required antibiotics, an increased odds of receiving timely antibiotics. In this large UK study, a digital sepsis alert has been shown to be associated with improved outcomes, including timely antibiotics.

These findings strongly suggest that the introduction of a network-wide digital sepsis alert is associated with improvements in patient outcomes, demonstrating that digital based interventions can be successfully introduced and readily evaluated as part of QI practice. To learn more about this study, please read the article published: Evaluating a digital sepsis alert in a London multisite hospital network: a natural experiment using electronic health record data.

Further funding

Dr Costelloe’s has now secured NIHR funding to extend this work to NHS trusts in other parts of the UK, working with Chelsea and Westminster, Oxford, UCLH, Reading & Berkshire and Cardiff.

Read more to learn more about this work.