Increasing sepsis survivorship creates new challenges

SAN ANTONIO – An upward trend in sepsis survivorship drove increases in sepsis survivors at risk for readmission and returns of these patients to the hospital via the emergency department, results of a retrospective, single-center analysis suggest.

The number of sepsis survivors at risk for hospital readmission rose substantially in recent years, according to the analysis of 17,256 adult medical and surgical admissions to University of Pennsylvania Health System hospitals between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2015. The journal Critical Care Medicine published these results online as Mark E. Mikkelsen, MD, was presenting them at the Critical Care Congress sponsored by the Society for Critical Care Medicine.

Andrew Bowser/Frontline Medical News

While 30-day readmission rates declined modestly over the same time period, that decrease was offset by a rise in emergency department treat-and-release visits, explained Dr. Mikkelsen, who coauthored the study.

Over the time period that Dr. Mikkelsen and his colleagues analyzed, the proportion of sepsis hospitalizations more than doubled from 3.9% to 9.4%, while in-hospital mortality rates for sepsis hospitalizations fell from 24.1% to 14.8%. As a result, the proportion of discharged patients at risk for readmission increased from 2.7% to 7.8%, noted Dr. Mikkelsen, associate professor of medicine at the Hospital of the University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.