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SALT LAKE CITY -- It's one of the most serious infections that can strike patients. But a new study shows two Utah hospitals have dramatically reduced the number of deaths associated with sepsis and septic shock.
Sepsis is a severe blood infection that attacks and kills a few hundred Utahns every year.
Dr. Todd Allen is an emergency room physician at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray and LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City. He led a research project that shows both hospitals greatly reduced the number of sepsis-related deaths.
He says sepsis can be hard to identify and hard to treat.
In essence, it sets a new bar for compliance with these sepsis bundles and a new floor for where mortality should be, if we're doing the right thing.
–Dr. Todd Allen
"An infection starts someplace in the body and spreads all over the body, and very often leads to death of the patient," says Allen.
It can start with a skin infection, a urinary tract infection, pneumonia or H1N1. The doctor says nearly 500,000 patients arrive in U.S. emergency rooms each year with sepsis. It kills 50 to 70 percent of victims.
"Sepsis is really just when that bug goes all over the body and the organs begin to fail -- the kidneys, the liver, the blood system itself," says Allen.
Six years ago, Intermountain Healthcare set a goal to treat patients with sepsis earlier, more aggressively and with a bundle of 11 treatments. They include specialized blood testing and administration of antibiotics, fluids and other medications.
Between 2004 and 2005, the two hospitals complied with all 11 treatments 22 percent of the time. By 2008 to 2009, compliance was up to 48 percent. Sepsis-related deaths dropped from 18 percent of patients to 10 percent.
Allen calls that a dramatic reduction.
"We have saved about 50 to 70 lives per year at those two institutions," he says.
Allen says no other study shows a reduction that great.
"In essence, it sets a new bar for compliance with these sepsis bundles," he says, "and a new floor for where mortality should be, if we're doing the right thing."
Across the entire Intermountain Healthcare system, the doctor thinks they may save as many as 100 lives a year in the future by following the treatment guidelines.
Allen thinks the study will get a lot of attention when it's presented at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Phoenix Saturday.
E-mail: jboal@ksl.com
