CDI Corner

Overcalling sepsis in your documentation when sepsis is actually not present has negative downstream effects:

  1. Inaccurately high sepsis mortality O/E, which is a reportable quality metric
  2. Inappropriately assigned elevated LOS for sepsis DRGs
  3. Inability to successfully conduct retrospective analyses of patient populations for retrospective research purposes 
  4. 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:

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