135. Optimising Early Warning Systems: Exploring Enhanced Digital Sepsis Alerts and Equity Challenges in Patient Care
Invited abstract in session TD-1: Blood and sepsis, stream Sessions.
Tuesday, 15:30-17:00Room: NTNU, Realfagbygget R5
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Kate Honeyford
|
| Global Business School for Health, University College London | |
| 2. | Alf Timney
|
| Institute of Cancer Research | |
| 3. | Ceire Costelloe
|
| Institute of Cancer Research |
Abstract
Early Warning Scores are used in hospitals to support clinical staff in the identification of patients at risk of deterioration. In England, the National Early Warning Score, now in its second iteration (NEWS2), is mandated in all acute hospitals. As hospitals adopted electronic health systems (EHRs), NEWS2 was embedded into EHRs alongside digital sepsis alerts (DSAs), as sepsis is a common cause of patient deterioration. However, NEWS2 and the majority of DSAs do not take advantage of the rich data in EHRs. It is not known whether adopting two alerting systems improves patient outcomes.
We have previously shown that the introduction of a DSA which included blood biomarkers was associated with reduced mortality. In this study we show that this DSA identified a higher proportion of additional patients who were at risk of deterioration than the DSAs which relied on clinical observations. Initial findings indicate that ethnicity can influence DSA triggers, highlighting potential biases in alerting systems. This poses challenges for clinical staff in responding to alerts.
As EHRs continue to be embedded in hospitals, the richness of the data should be exploited to ensure the patients in most need of intervention are rapidly identified.
Keywords
- Decision support
- Health Services Research
Status: accepted
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