Sepsis is one of the deadliest conditions a hospital patient can encounter. St. Luke’s University Health Network, based in Bethlehem, Pa., is one of the nation’s leaders in helping to prevent it.
St. Luke’s uses a dynamic mix of both human and artificial intelligence (AI) monitoring to achieve some of the best sepsis compliance and sepsis survival rates in the nation.
“We utilize the Epic Sepsis Model – predictive AI – in the background, along with programming engineered by St. Luke’s, to monitor every patient every moment of the day for rising risk,” said Charles Sonday, St. Luke’s Associate Chief Medical Information Officer. “If a patient rises above a certain threshold ... an alert goes to both the provider and the nurse to examine that patient and begin treatment.”
This unique approach to preventing and treating sepsis is one of the factors that contributed to the Network being ranked #1 nationwide in quality, safety and patient experience by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Across the Network, every patient in a medical-surgical unit is monitored around the clock. The vital signs, lab results, nursing notes and more are transmitted to a virtual response center staffed by registered nurses. When a patient starts meeting certain metric parameters, the care team knows long before it becomes an ICU emergency.
With survival rates climbing and unexpected ICU transfers declining, St. Luke's is showing what real world responsible medical AI looks like: always on and keeping patients safer without replacing the humans who care for them.
St. Luke’s has engineered the use of these tools – combined with hands-on human response – to achieve top 10% results nationally in sepsis performance. St. Luke’s fiscal year sepsis bundle compliant rate as determined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was just under 88% compared to the national average of 64% and the Pennsylvania average of 61%.
“The sepsis bundle is a list of elements that focus on very timely metrics,” explained Diana Tarone, St. Luke’s Senior Network Director of Quality. “We are checking to see if the patient is hypotensive and needs a vasopressor, what antibiotics are administered. It is a constant and consistent watching, monitoring and reassessing of the patient.”
At the virtual response center – located off-site, simultaneously serving all St. Luke’s hospital campuses – an array of computer monitors lists the patients and their vital signs, with the most at-risk rising to the top.
“It’s a very complex list of factors and there has to be a lot of communication between the physician team, the advanced practitioner team and the nursing team,” said Dr. Jennifer Axelband, St. Luke’s Associate Medical Director of Critical Care Education. “We use AI monitoring in the background to help us stay compliant with these bundles because statistics show that if you stay compliant with the metrics established by CMS, it decreases patient mortality by 30%."
