Assessment of Health Care Exposures and Outcomes in Adult Patients With Sepsis and Septic Shock.

Importance: Current information on the characteristics of patients who develop sepsis may help in identifying opportunities to improve outcomes. Most recent studies of sepsis epidemiology have focused on changes in incidence or have used administrative data sets that provided limited patient-level data. Objective: To describe sepsis epidemiology in adults. Design, Setting, and Participants: This retrospective cohort study reviewed the medical records, death certificates, and hospital discharge data of adult patients with sepsis or septic shock who were discharged from the hospital between October 1, 2014, and September 30, 2015. The convenience sample was obtained from hospitals in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging Infections Program in 10 states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee). Patients 18 years and older with discharge diagnosis codes for severe sepsis or septic shock were randomly selected. Data were analyzed between May 1, 2018, and January 31, 2019. Main Outcomes and Measures: The population's demographic characteristics, health care exposures, and sepsis-associated infections and pathogens were described, and risk factors for death within 30 days after sepsis diagnosis were assessed. Results: Among 1078 adult patients with sepsis (569 men [52.8%]; median age, 64 years [interquartile range, 53-75 years]), 973 patients (90.3%) were classified as having community-onset sepsis (ie, sepsis diagnosed within 3 days of hospital admission). In total, 654 patients (60.7%) had health care exposures before their hospital admission for sepsis; 260 patients (24.1%) had outpatient encounters in the 7 days before admission, and 447 patients (41.5%) received medical treatment, including antimicrobial drugs, chemotherapy, wound care, dialysis, or surgery, in the 30 days before admission. A pathogen associated with sepsis was found in 613 patients (56.9%); the most common pathogens identified were Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Clostridioides difficile. After controlling for other factors, an association was found between underlying comorbidities, such as cirrhosis (odds ratio, 3.59; 95% CI, 2.03-6.32), immunosuppression (odds ratio, 2.52; 95% CI, 1.81-3.52), vascular disease (odds ratio, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.10-2.15), and 30-day mortality. Conclusions and Relevance: Most adults experienced sepsis onset outside of the hospital and had recent encounters with the health care system. A sepsis-associated pathogen was identified in more than half of patients. Future efforts to improve sepsis outcomes may benefit from examination of health maintenance practices and recent health care exposures as potential opportunities among high-risk patients.

A National Approach to Pediatric Sepsis Surveillance.

Pediatric sepsis is a major public health concern, and robust surveillance tools are needed to characterize its incidence, outcomes, and trends. The increasing use of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States creates an opportunity to conduct reliable, pragmatic, and generalizable population-level surveillance using routinely collected clinical data rather than administrative claims or resource-intensive chart review. In 2015, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recruited sepsis investigators and representatives of key professional societies to develop an approach to adult sepsis surveillance using clinical data recorded in EHRs. This led to the creation of the adult sepsis event definition, which was used to estimate the national burden of sepsis in adults and has been adapted into a tool kit to facilitate widespread implementation by hospitals. In July 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened a new multidisciplinary pediatric working group to tailor an EHR-based national sepsis surveillance approach to infants and children. Here, we describe the challenges specific to pediatric sepsis surveillance, including evolving clinical definitions of sepsis, accommodation of age-dependent physiologic differences, identifying appropriate EHR markers of infection and organ dysfunction among infants and children, and the need to account for children with medical complexity and the growing regionalization of pediatric care. We propose a preliminary pediatric sepsis event surveillance definition and outline next steps for refining and validating these criteria so that they may be used to estimate the national burden of pediatric sepsis and support site-specific surveillance to complement ongoing initiatives to improve sepsis prevention, recognition, and treatment.

Sepsis Surveillance Using Adult Sepsis Events Simplified eSOFA Criteria Versus Sepsis-3 Sequential Organ Failure Assessment Criteria.

OBJECTIVES: Sepsis-3 defines organ dysfunction as an increase in the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score by greater than or equal to 2 points. However, some Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score components are not routinely recorded in all hospitals' electronic health record systems, limiting its utility for wide-scale sepsis surveillance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released the Adult Sepsis Event surveillance definition that includes simplified organ dysfunction criteria optimized for electronic health records (eSOFA). We compared eSOFA versus Sequential Organ Failure Assessment with regard to sepsis prevalence, overlap, and outcomes. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING: One hundred eleven U.S. hospitals in the Cerner HealthFacts dataset. PATIENTS: Adults hospitalized in 2013-2015. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: We identified clinical indicators of presumed infection (blood cultures and antibiotics) concurrent with either: 1) an increase in Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score by 2 or more points (Sepsis-3) or 2) 1 or more eSOFA criteria: vasopressor initiation, mechanical ventilation initiation, lactate greater than or equal to 2.0 mmol/L, doubling in creatinine, doubling in bilirubin to greater than or equal to 2.0 mg/dL, or greater than or equal to 50% decrease in platelet count to less than 100 cells/µL (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Adult Sepsis Event). We compared area under the receiver operating characteristic curves for discriminating in-hospital mortality, adjusting for baseline characteristics. Of 942,360 patients in the cohort, 57,242 (6.1%) had sepsis by Sequential Organ Failure Assessment versus 41,618 (4.4%) by eSOFA. Agreement between sepsis by Sequential Organ Failure Assessment and eSOFA was good (Cronbach's alpha 0.81). Baseline characteristics and infectious diagnoses were similar, but mortality was higher with eSOFA (17.1%) versus Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (14.4%; p < 0.001) as was discrimination for mortality (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, 0.774 vs 0.759; p < 0.001). Comparisons were consistent across subgroups of age, infectious diagnoses, and comorbidities. CONCLUSIONS: The Adult Sepsis Event's eSOFA organ dysfunction criteria identify a smaller, more severely ill sepsis cohort compared with the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score, but with good overlap and similar clinical characteristics. Adult Sepsis Events may facilitate wide-scale automated sepsis surveillance that tracks closely with the more complex Sepsis-3 criteria.

Assessing Variability in Hospital-Level Mortality Among U.S. Medicare Beneficiaries With Hospitalizations for Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the variability in short-term sepsis mortality by hospital among Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services beneficiaries in the United States during 2013-2014. DESIGN: A retrospective cohort design. SETTING: Hospitalizations from 3,068 acute care hospitals that participated in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services inpatient prospective payment system in 2013 and 2014. PATIENTS: Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries greater than or equal to 65 years old who had an inpatient hospitalization coded with present at admission severe sepsis or septic shock. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Individual level mortality was assessed as death at or within 7 days of hospital discharge and aggregated to calculate hospital-level mortality rates. We used a logistic hierarchal linear model to calculate mortality risk-adjusted for patient characteristics. We quantified variability among hospitals using the median odds ratio and calculated risk-standardized mortality rates for each hospital. The overall crude mortality rate was 34.7%. We found significant variability in mortality by hospital (p < 0.001). The middle 50% of hospitals had similar risk-standardized mortality rates (32.7-36.9%), whereas the decile of hospitals with the highest risk-standardized mortality rates had a median mortality rate of 40.7%, compared with a median of 29.2% for hospitals in the decile with the lowest risk-standardized mortality rates. The median odds ratio (1.29) was lower than the adjusted odds ratios for several measures of patient comorbidities and severity of illness, including present at admission organ dysfunction, no identified source of infection, and age. CONCLUSIONS: In a large study of present at admission sepsis among Medicare beneficiaries, we showed that mortality was most strongly associated with underlying comorbidities and measures of illness on arrival. However, after adjusting for patient characteristics, mortality also modestly depended on where a patient with sepsis received care, suggesting that efforts to improve sepsis outcomes in lower performing hospitals could impact sepsis survival.

Combatting Sepsis: A Public Health Perspective.

Public health professionals and organizations have an opportunity to create a more comprehensive sepsis prevention strategy that spans the continuum of care and merges existing infection prevention strategies with chronic disease management and improved education on the signs and symptoms of worsening infection and sepsis. Recent public health efforts have improved our understanding of US national sepsis epidemiology and focused on increasing sepsis awareness. Additional opportunities and challenges include creating more integrated sepsis and infection prevention programs that encompass outpatient and inpatient care.

Incidence and Trends of Sepsis in US Hospitals Using Clinical vs Claims Data, 2009-2014.

Importance: Estimates from claims-based analyses suggest that the incidence of sepsis is increasing and mortality rates from sepsis are decreasing. However, estimates from claims data may lack clinical fidelity and can be affected by changing diagnosis and coding practices over time. Objective: To estimate the US national incidence of sepsis and trends using detailed clinical data from the electronic health record (EHR) systems of diverse hospitals. Design, Setting, and Population: Retrospective cohort study of adult patients admitted to 409 academic, community, and federal hospitals from 2009-2014. Exposures: Sepsis was identified using clinical indicators of presumed infection and concurrent acute organ dysfunction, adapting Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3) criteria for objective and consistent EHR-based surveillance. Main Outcomes and Measures: Sepsis incidence, outcomes, and trends from 2009-2014 were calculated using regression models and compared with claims-based estimates using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes for severe sepsis or septic shock. Case-finding criteria were validated against Sepsis-3 criteria using medical record reviews. Results: A total of 173 690 sepsis cases (mean age, 66.5 [SD, 15.5] y; 77 660 [42.4%] women) were identified using clinical criteria among 2 901 019 adults admitted to study hospitals in 2014 (6.0% incidence). Of these, 26 061 (15.0%) died in the hospital and 10 731 (6.2%) were discharged to hospice. From 2009-2014, sepsis incidence using clinical criteria was stable (+0.6% relative change/y [95% CI, -2.3% to 3.5%], P = .67) whereas incidence per claims increased (+10.3%/y [95% CI, 7.2% to 13.3%], P < .001). In-hospital mortality using clinical criteria declined (-3.3%/y [95% CI, -5.6% to -1.0%], P = .004), but there was no significant change in the combined outcome of death or discharge to hospice (-1.3%/y [95% CI, -3.2% to 0.6%], P = .19). In contrast, mortality using claims declined significantly (-7.0%/y [95% CI, -8.8% to -5.2%], P < .001), as did death or discharge to hospice (-4.5%/y [95% CI, -6.1% to -2.8%], P < .001). Clinical criteria were more sensitive in identifying sepsis than claims (69.7% [95% CI, 52.9% to 92.0%] vs 32.3% [95% CI, 24.4% to 43.0%], P < .001), with comparable positive predictive value (70.4% [95% CI, 64.0% to 76.8%] vs 75.2% [95% CI, 69.8% to 80.6%], P = .23). Conclusions and Relevance: In clinical data from 409 hospitals, sepsis was present in 6% of adult hospitalizations, and in contrast to claims-based analyses, neither the incidence of sepsis nor the combined outcome of death or discharge to hospice changed significantly between 2009-2014. The findings also suggest that EHR-based clinical data provide more objective estimates than claims-based data for sepsis surveillance.

National burden of invasive methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections, United States, 2011.

IMPORTANCE: Estimating the US burden of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections is important for planning and tracking success of prevention strategies. OBJECTIVE: To describe updated national estimates and characteristics of health care- and community-associated invasive methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections in 2011. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Active laboratory-based case finding identified MRSA cultures in 9 US metropolitan areas from 2005 through 2011. Invasive infections (MRSA cultured from normally sterile body sites) were classified as health care-associated community-onset (HACO) infections (cultured ≤ 3 days after admission and/or prior year dialysis, hospitalization, surgery, long-term care residence, or central vascular catheter presence ≤ 2 days before culture); hospital-onset infections (cultured >3 days after admission); or community-associated infections if no other criteria were met. National estimates were adjusted using US census and US Renal Data System data. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: National estimates of invasive HACO, hospital-onset, and community-associated MRSA infections using US census and US Renal Data System data as the denominator. RESULTS: An estimated 80,461 (95% CI, 69,515-93,914) invasive MRSA infections occurred nationally in 2011. Of these, 48,353 (95% CI, 40,195-58,642) were HACO infections; 14,156 (95% CI, 10,096-20,440) were hospital-onset infections; and 16,560 (95% CI, 12,806-21,811) were community-associated infections. Since 2005, adjusted national estimated incidence rates decreased among HACO infections by 27.7% and hospital-onset infections decreased by 54.2%; community-associated infections decreased by only 5.0%. Among recently hospitalized community-onset (nondialysis) infections, 64% occurred 3 months or less after discharge, and 32% of these were admitted from long-term care facilities. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: An estimated 30,800 fewer invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2011 compared with 2005; in 2011 fewer infections occurred among patients during hospitalization than among persons in the community without recent health care exposures. Effective strategies for preventing infections outside acute care settings will have the greatest impact on further reducing invasive MRSA infections nationally.