Listen to the July 28 informational call, led by faculty, regarding IHI’s upcoming Collaboratives. Review the presentation slides. Please note due to technical difficulties, the first two minutes of the call were not recorded. At this time, a general program description was presented.
The Challenge
At 30 to 50 percent, mortality associated with severe sepsis remains unacceptably high. When shock is present, mortality is reported to be even higher: 50 to 60 percent. Worldwide 1,400 people die each day from sepsis and that number is projected to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent per year. This means that even small reductions in mortality due to sepsis can translate into thousands of lives saved each year.
Hundreds of thousands of people die yearly as a result of systemic infection and there are proven ways to prevent this from happening. A 25 percent reduction in mortality due to sepsis has the potential to save the lives of 50,000 people in the United States and perhaps 1,100,000 individuals worldwide. Recent trials demonstrate that mortality can be reduced through new interventions. However, these interventions are not being applied uniformly or in a timely fashion to the population of patients who need them. Until standard processes are applied to this problem, the delivery of best-known care will remain haphazard and unreliable and we will fail to achieve significant declines in mortality.
The Solution
IHI's Reducing Sepsis Mortality Collaborative is designed to help teams improve the treatment of sepsis in their hospitals and reduce the high mortality rate associated with it.
Severe sepsis and septic shock are areas of medicine and surgery where great strides can be made to save thousands of lives. By finding better ways of working together and creating new methods of care processes, we will implement practice styles that ensure every patient receives the best care possible. This effort has the potential to transform the way medicine is practiced, as we learn to build improvement methods into our routine practice that can be applied to other areas of medicine. Several hospitals working with IHI through the Improving Outcomes for High-Risk and Critically Ill Patients Learning and Innovation Community have demonstrated that achieving aims for reducing sepsis mortality is within reach.
This 12-month Collaborative will focus on elements of the sepsis "bundles," or a group of evidence-based interventions related to reducing sepsis mortality that, when executed together, result in better outcomes than when implemented individually. This program will be structured to meet you where you are in your current improvement work.
Led by experts on the leading edge of this work, this Collaborative will provide teams with the opportunity to work together to ensure reliable identification and treatment of patients with sepsis. Teams will benefit from interaction with clinical experts and the collaborative learning built on the progress and experience of other hospitals.
