At the Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes (IPSO) National Workshop, December 10-11, 2020, UNC Children’s Hospital was recognized for demonstrating important improvements in outcomes for key sepsis measures.
At the Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes (IPSO) National Workshop, December 10-11, 2020, UNC Children’s Hospital was recognized for demonstrating important improvements in outcomes for key sepsis measures. Lori DuPree RN, April Glick, heather Curran RN, Danielle Stolfi RN, and Roxanne Heaphy were all able to attend from UNC. Dr. Daniel Park, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine and Dr. Afsaneh Pirzadeh, Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Critical Care help to lead the Pediatric IPSO and sepsis work within UNC Children’s.
UNC Children’s was specifically recognized for statistically significant improvements in Trigger Activations and has seen important improvements in time fluid boluses are completed and time to first antibiotics over the past year.
IPSO is a national collaborative within the Children’s Hospital Association that aims to reduce sepsis-attributable mortality and improve survivor outcomes through early identification and timely treatment. The Children’s Hospital Association IPSO Collaborative provides tools that support gathering of data on several key sepsis identifiers. This data assists in closing gaps in sepsis patient documentation, standardizing sepsis documentation, and addressing sepsis coding inconsistencies. Other benefits include facilitating clinical decision support-example trigger tools and best practice alerts. The IPSO Collaborative tool has wide inclusion sepsis patient criteria that enables us to review cases for potential gaps in sepsis event identification and gaps in patient care.
A big thank you to April Glick for leading the group and continuing to drive process improvements for pediatric sepsis. In the past year she had made significant progress in moving several key process improvements forward. Some of these include:
- Educational resources developed for clinicians (badge cards, huddle smartphrase)
- Promoted usage of the ED sepsis bundle order set
- Formed a nurse workgroup to provide best practice recommendations for Epic documentation
- Enhanced the sepsis star recognition process
- Improved data transparency
- Developed and continues to grow our committee of sepsis leaders
- All of our collaborative work is in effort to have lower sepsis rates than our peers, decrease mortality and to decrease the financial burden of critical sepsis and hospital-onset sepsis.
The IPSO Executive Report provides an update on UNC data in comparison to aggregate data. The report also calls out our improvements over the past year. Over the past year UNC Children’s has collaborated with other IPSO hospitals to learn from each other and advance sepsis documentation efforts.
UNC Children’s has seen significant improvement in the following IPSO Quality Measures
- Use of the initial sepsis screening process is increasing.
- Use of the sepsis huddle is increasing.
- Number of days on IV antibiotics is decreasing for IPSO Sepsis patients.