Sepsis screening tool development
To develop a sepsis-screening tool, we first began a multidisciplinary sepsis-working group to develop a severe sepsis and septic shock alert for patients older than 14 years of age. The group used multiple “Plan, Do, Study, Act” (PDSA) cycles to test different combinations and determine appropriate detection parameters [14]. After multiple PDSA cycles in the development (testing) domain of our electronic health record (EHR) system, the combination shown in Sepsis-screening tool alert parameters appeared to have the best ability to screen for severe sepsis and septic shock in an ED setting. This tool works as follows.