The Importance and Effectiveness of a Sepsis Detection and Alerting System

AWARE Sepsis DART is a real-time communication platform, integrated into your EHR’s workflow, that uses smart notifications to reduce physician and nurse alert fatigue.

The DART platform automatically monitors the sepsis treatment bundle and communicates necessary actions to the right clinicians at the right time. This solution gives you the power to continuously track information on septic patients even between care location moves and shifting staff. Smart notifications reduce fatigue, errors, and omissions as the entire care team understands, on a real-time basis, what treatment elements have and have not been delivered, and how much time is left to successfully complete treatment. Using the Clinical Control Tower technology enables caregivers to deliver the appropriate patient care for nearly any clinical situation, not just sepsis, and is extensible across your entire health system.

Sepsis DART was developed with Mayo Clinic and is an end-to-end sepsis alert solution that is much more than just a sepsis patient tracker board. In recognizing and treating sepsis, there are essentially four things that are critical to effective sepsis treatment.

1. Early sepsis detection: Sepsis alert automation with Sepsis DART’s configurable algorithm approach, including the ability to deploy different algorithms in different units. This ability brings the potential development of sepsis to the attention of a provider or nurse while they are delivering care to their patients. Subtle changes may be taking place in the patient’s condition, and often the care team can become very focused on the current problem(s) they are dealing with and might miss the onset of sepsis without an effective sepsis alert.

2. Early sepsis intervention: Firing a sepsis alert for a patient in the EHR is great but does absolutely no good unless a provider steps in, reviews the patient’s case, and declares that the patient does indeed have sepsis, and then begins to institute treatment. DART’s smart sepsis alerts drive early intervention. Using DART’s remote patient monitoring and bedside monitoring capability drives rapid response for potential septic patients.

3. Timely delivery of all required sepsis care elements: The treatment bundle for sepsis is well defined, and when delivered comprehensively within the defined time windows, provides remarkable improvements in not only the survivability of sepsis but also in reductions of total care and length of hospitalization for patients who acquire sepsis. Appropriate delivery of bundles facilitates consistent and timely application of evidence-based care and reduces practice variability. When the timely delivery of the correct care elements are in jeopardy a smart reminder, received by doctors and nurses, even if they are not in the EHR, will help ensure bundle completion.

4. Automated Communication: Sepsis DART’s functionality provides automatic sepsis alert and at-a-glance awareness of patient status, enabling bedside and remote patient monitoring of large numbers of patients simultaneously. Our sepsis alert solution also employs smart notifications that directly notify the right caregivers at the right time of a potential sepsis development in a patient. Using smart escalation, Sepsis DART continues to notify caregivers via a smart sepsis alert until someone on the team takes the appropriate action. Sepsis DART does this and simultaneously graphically tracks the delivery of the sepsis bundle (as appropriate for that patient) while providing both smart sepsis alert notification and smart sepsis alert escalation where elements of the bundle may be in jeopardy of not being delivered correctly or in a timely fashion.