New Sepsis Alert Saving Lives

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Medical technology at a Memphis hospital is saving hundreds of lives. An alert built into the computers tells doctors and nurses if a patient is headed down the wrong path.

"I worked a little at St. Jude, I did a little labor and delivery, I worked some on the floor."

For Kaye Stewart, nursing is all she knows. It's been her duty for 28 years. So, when her body started talking to her in January of 2008, she knew she should listen.

"I had a very large stone that was blocking the kidney, so the kidney was swelling, and what's why it hurt so bad," says Kaye Stewart, pediatric nurse at LeBonheur.

After doctors removed the stone, it wasn't smooth sailing for Stewart.

Stewart says "they had given me 4 liters of fluid, my pressure was still low, i had spiked a fever, and my white count was very elevated which is the early signs of sepsis." Sepsis had set in after surgery.

Dr. Tripp A. Dargie, M.D., an emergency room doctor at Methodist Germantown, says "it's the body's reaction to an overall terrible bacterial infection."

The infection varies with each individual, but, Dr. Tripp A. Dargie says the normal progression is about six hours.

"There is a big difference in what we can do in that time frame and that's why early detection is such a critical part of sepsis," says Dargie.

With sepsis being difficult to diagnose, Methodist Hospital joined the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, to educate nurses on warning signs. They were still missing cases. So, they built a rule into the emergency medical records, and now they catch it every time.

The emergency room doctor says "the initial sepsis bug will get fired if they have a very high heart rate, low blood pressure; it takes at least two of those to fire the sepsis bug, that alerts us, something is wrong, potentially sepsis, with this patient."

The new procedure is saving lives, every day. And Kaye Stewart, the sepsis survivor, is "real happy the hospital has a thing in place that people can recognize what's going on early, and treat it."

Methodist is training hospitals around the country to implement the sepsis test into their medical records.

So far, they have worked with healthcare groups in Florida, California, Washington, and New Jersey.