Speaker Outlines Infrastructure for a Sepsis Initiative

​In undertaking a sepsis initiative, "we created tools and structure on a system level," said Deborah Larkin-Carney, RN, vice president of quality, RWJBarnabas Health, and individual hospitals within the system customized policies, tools, and other infrastructure based on their individual needs and resources. Larkin-Carney presented "The New Face of Sepsis: Are You Ready for July 1?", a webinar sponsored by the National Association for Healthcare Quality and Nuance Communications, on Wednesday, June 22, 2016. The organization undertook a sepsis initiative after identifying sepsis as one of the top 10 causes of death during mortality reviews; it was also spurred by efforts such as the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC), New York regulations addressing sepsis care, the New Jersey Hospital Association's sepsis collaborative, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) core measure for sepsis. Despite changes to the algorithm, adherence to the CMS measure is a formidable task. "It is probably one of the most challenging of measures that we have today that has come out of CMS," said Larkin-Carney. "It's an all-or-nothing bundle." She suggested asking the vendor to supply a breakdown of individual failure points within the measure to allow targeting of improvement efforts.