Note from ACDIS Director: The changing tide of sepsis definitions

By Brian Murphy

These days it seems sepsis is constantly in the news. Hardly a day passes where the efficacy of some new life-saving drug is being advocated or disputed, a sepsis DRG downgraded, or Sepsis-2 versus Sepsis-3 definitions debated. We’ve also had some major recent news from the likes of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign.

CDI specialists inhabit a world in which they need to navigate three sets of reporting requirements: Sepsis-2, Sepsis-3, and SEP-1, the latter from the National Quality Forum measure for public reporting of sepsis.

How can CDI specialists make sense of it all? I recommend reading our most recent ACDIS White Paper, “Where are we now with sepsis?”

The paper covers in detail the multiple issues around this tricky diagnosis, from the problems inherent in administrative versus clinical data, to systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), sepsis, severe sepsis, and septic shock prior to the new Sepsis-3 definitions in 2016, and the definitions post Sepsis-3. The article also includes a nice bulleted summary and takeaways for your CDI department and medical staff.

Special thanks for principal authorship go to ACDIS advisory board member Sam Antonios, MD, FACP, SFHM, CPE, CCDS. Though primary authorship goes to Antonios, the entire ACDIS advisory board reviewed the work prior to publication.

To download the new White Paper, click here.

I would also encourage any of our ACDIS members who haven’t been by our resource pages in a while to check out all our White Papers and Position Papers. We’ve been publishing some helpful guidance of late, and more is on the way.

I hope this paper proves helpful in your continued mission of clinical accuracy in the patient chart.

If you have suggestions for topics you’d like to see the advisory board address, please let me know via email at bmurphy@acdis.org.