National Quality Forum, The Joint Commission recognize HCA Healthcare
for its algorithm-driven sepsis early warning technology.
By Denise Kendust
Fort Walton Beach Medical Center and Twin Cities Hospital’s parent company, HCA Healthcare (NYSE: HCA), announced it has been recognized by The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum (NQF) with the prestigious John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for its pioneering work using artificial intelligence to help reduce sepsis mortality.
Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy, known as SPOT, received the award for Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality at the national level. SPOT goes by the popular dog name because it sniffs out sepsis in a way humans cannot. Its algorithm continuously monitors vital signs, lab results, nursing reports and other data to detect often subtle changes in a patient’s condition and alerts clinicians to signs of sepsis in patients, as much as six hours earlier than previously, so they can take appropriate action.
“The current public health climate of COVID-19 has emphasized now more than ever the importance of early detection of life-threatening illnesses,” said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, HCA Healthcare’s chief medical officer and president, clinical services group. “We are honored to receive this respected award for our technology that helps clinicians detect sepsis earlier, accelerates treatment, improves the care provided to patients, and helps save lives.”
Sepsis is an overwhelming infection that can lead to total body failure, taking the lives of approximately 270,000 Americans each year. A case study on SPOT was featured in the May-June issue of NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery.
HCA Healthcare is a learning health system that uses the significant data it collects from approximately 35 million annual patient care episodes to inform and improve the care it provides to patients. HCA Healthcare’s national clinical data warehouse, which receives information from the electronic health record, is the heart of HCA Healthcare’s data ecosystem, providing the ability to aggregate and analyze data streams in real time and feed tools like SPOT that, in turn, provide actionable information to caregivers.
The Eisenberg Awards bring together the quality community to recognize groundbreaking initiatives in health care that are consistent with the aims of the National Quality Strategy: better care, healthy people and communities, and smarter spending.
The awards recognize major individual, local and national achievements in health care that improve patient safety and health care quality. “This year’s Eisenberg Award recipients have demonstrated both a positive impact on the patients they serve as well as fulfilling the quality community’s mission to ensure that care is measured and can be improved,” said Shantanu Agrawal, MD, MPhil, president and chief executive officer, National Quality Forum.
The patient safety awards program, launched in 2002, honors the late John M. Eisenberg, MD, MBA, former administrator of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). An impassioned advocate for health care quality improvement, Eisenberg was a member of NQF’s founding board of directors, chaired the federal government’s Quality Interagency Coordination Task Force and personally led AHRQ’s grant program to support patient safety research.
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