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Uniphy Health, a clinical communication provider, has deployed Uniphy Sentinel sepsis alerting solution at Jersey City Medical Center (JCMC)-RWJBarnabas Health.
Currently, many hospitals do not have a dedicated sepsis alerting system and manage their sepsis alerts through ad-hoc systems that combine both automated and manual processes.
These existing systems may respond too slowly, may not recognize the signs of sepsis soon enough, or send too many “false” or insignificant alerts, leading to alert fatigue among hospital staff.
Uniphy Health’s Sentinel solution for sepsis draws on predictive analytics to assess which patients are septic and/or at risk for septic shock. The system monitors more than seventy clinical features in real-time including body temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, white blood cell count, medication lists, blood culture reports, diagnostic imaging and clinicians’ progress notes. Sentinel can be integrated with the hospital’s EHR and can also take in laboratory and pharmacy data feeds.
Utilizing this methodology, Sentinel minimizes the risk of alert fatigue with 75 percent fewer alerts and delivers only alerts for high-value tasks and only to care team members best positioned to respond to a high-value issue.
“Sepsis is deadly in both acute and post-acute care settings,” said Stuart Hochron, co-founder and chief medical officer, Uniphy Health.
“We are confident that Sentinel’s predictive analytics and automated response management, which sends only high-risk alerts to the right clinicians will deliver an immediate positive impact on patient outcomes, for JCMC-RWJBarnabas Health and other facilities that implement the solution on the Uniphy Health Platform.”
Every year, septic shock, a physiological response to infection in which the body shuts down its own organ systems, strikes more than one million Americans, up to 50 percent of who die as a result.
Septic shock typically occurs in acute care settings and nursing home environments. In addition, hospitals spend an average of $23.6 billion each year for sepsis care, making it the most expensive condition treated by hospitals.
Uniphy Sentinel is the commercially available version of a sepsis alerting system originally developed in conjunction with the United States Air Force.
Kenneth Garay, chief medical officer at JCMC-RWJBarnabas Health, said: “We are deploying Uniphy Sentinel to provide our care team physicians and nurses with secure, real-time alerts and put them in the best position to act on high-value messages that, if missed or delayed, pose a high risk to our patients’ lives.
“We have worked with Uniphy Health for five years and have implemented various secure communications tools that have already reduced inpatient communication delays between physicians and other care team members and helped improve outcomes. I am looking forward to seeing the results from the implementation of Sentinel.”
Garay continued, “JCMC-RWJ BarnabasHealth is a hospital on the leading edge of using innovative mobile communication and collaboration technologies to improve patient health and help care professionals work more effectively. The Uniphy Health Platform makes it easy for us to configure, test and deploy new solutions such as Sentinel. We look forward to this exciting next chapter in our relationship.”
Uniphy Health, US, Sepsis, Healthcare, Technology, IT, JCMC, Uniphy Sentinel, Data analytics, Risk management, Stuart Hochron, Kenneth Garay
