Journal Club: Prevalence of electronic screening for sepsis in NHS acute hospitals in England

Kate Honeyford, Amen-Patrick Nwosu, Runa Lazzarino, Anne Kinderlerer, John Welch, Andrew J Brent, Graham Cooke, Peter Ghazal, Shashank Patil, DiAlS Co-investigators and Ceire E Costelloe

Join Kate Honeyford and Ceire E Costelloe in discussion with Katie MacLure (BCS Health & Care Scotland) for our live BCS BMJ HCI Journal Club hosted by Digital Health.

Synopsis

This journal club is based on a paper entitled, Prevalence of electronic screening for sepsis in National Health Service acute hospitals in England | BMJ Health & Care Informatics

The authors set out to describe digital sepsis alerts (DSAs) in use in English National Health Service (NHS) acute hospitals. A Freedom of Information request surveyed acute NHS Trusts on their adoption of electronic patient records (EPRs) and DSAs. Not all Trusts were willing or able to provide details of their EPR or the underlying algorithm. They concluded that many English NHS Trusts use DSAs; even those using similar triggers vary and many recreate paper systems. Despite the proliferation of machine learning algorithms being developed to support early detection of sepsis, there is little evidence that these are being used to improve personalised sepsis detection.