New guidelines aim to improve sepsis care in US hospitals
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Taison Bell of UVA Health and experts from eight other professional groups created new guidelines to standardize sepsis care across American hospitals.
Sepsis, a life-threatening full-body infection, causes at least 350,000 deaths in the United States annually. The new recommendations cover many areas of care, from quickly identifying infections with molecular testing to providing immediate antibiotics for septic shock, a dangerous emergency. The guidelines also emphasize preventing infections within hospitals, suggesting daily toothbrushing for patients to reduce pneumonia.
These experts hope to improve the consistency and reliability of care for sepsis patients by focusing on the systems hospitals use for diagnosis, treatment, and quality improvement. The group acknowledged that new technologies like advanced diagnostics and artificial intelligence could further improve sepsis care, but stressed that these tools require additional testing before hospitals broadly adopt them. They published the guidelines in Clinical Infectious Diseases as a position paper, intending to provide a framework for better sepsis management.
