Using AI and people power to combat sepsis

Developed by the Royal College of Physicians, "the National Early Warning Score is a wonderful system that uses measures the nurses are already capturing to give you an idea that you might want to take a closer look at your patient, that they might be showing signs of early decline," explained Dr. Thomas Selva, chief medical information officer at MU Healthcare and medical director for the Tiger Institute for Health Innovation. Selva, who will be presenting at HIMSS22 this year, explained that the team took the score, reviewed how nurses were already documenting care, and then combined input from the nursing staff and rapid response teams. "This means the rapid response teams can come in earlier before patients have critical decline and either prevent that decline from occurring or get them to a higher level of care before decline occurs out on the floors," Selva said. "With our implementation of the NEWS score, we were able to significantly increase the amount of rapid response team activations, significantly decrease the amount of code blue activations on the floor and, overall, reduce mortality over the timeline we were following – and that has continued," said Selva. "What we have learned throughout this entire journey … is that, oftentimes, quality improvement teams will, in the end, want to make some change in our electronic medical record or health IT environment to 'standardize the delivery of care,'" said Selva.