The 2021 Innovator Awards First-Place Winning Team: UCHealth

Among the tools used are Epic’s sepsis index and deterioration index. They also use a shock index and a respiratory distress index, which is something developed internally at UCHealth. “That’s useful to get upstream, because often the nurses haven’t had a chance to even validate that data,” Hassell explains, “but we’re seeing that the patient is tachycardic or hypotensive, and we can act on that and start to get ahead of identifying it.” Davis notes that although they are leveraging Epic’s model, there is added complexity around pulling in demographic information from the EHR — age and past history — to inform the risk model. He also says that the familiarity of dealing with sepsis regularly improves performance. “Even though there’s a sepsis bundle, it’s enormously complicated. There are something like 140 discrete tasks to accomplish to get somebody through the six-hour sepsis treatment window when we’re following the whole bundle,” he explains. “If you’re in a relatively quiet community hospital that doesn’t necessarily see a lot of sepsis, you’re just not doing it day in and day out. But the VHC team sees 15 to 20 sepsis alerts a day, so they become expert at it and are familiar with the nuances, and that’s key. So having a virtualized checklist to handle that complexity is a big value-added.”

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