Overcalling sepsis in your documentation when sepsis is actually not present has negative downstream effects:
- Inaccurately high sepsis mortality O/E, which is a reportable quality metric
- Inappropriately assigned elevated LOS for sepsis DRGs
- Inability to successfully conduct retrospective analyses of patient populations for retrospective research purposes
- To stem these negative consequences of overcalling sepsis, please remember to:
Mention in your chart that “sepsis was ruled out” if you initially suspected sepsis, but then later determined that the patient’s SIRS criteria were not due to infection/sepsis. The following two slides may help: