This is one of the deadliest hospital conditions that most people have never heard of.

1. My Dad Died of What?
This question is asked by millions of families losing loved ones to sepsis
Your Dad is being taken by ambulance to the ER and you need to call the hospital now. I heard
those dreaded words several years ago. By the time I located the attending ER Physician who
had worked with him, he was in the ICU on life support. All of this unfolded in a matter of
minutes. He lived out-of-state and I had just spoken with him two days prior - he seemed fine.
The ER doctor shared that he had been speaking with the EMTs but was unresponsive when he
arrived in the ER. I received his death certificate a week later and cause of death was heart
failure. He had the heart of someone years younger so I called the hospital back and located
the ER Physician who initially treated him. He remembered my Dad and explained to me that
he died of sepsis.
Until that time, I had never heard of sepsis. Since then I have talked with many people who
have lost loved ones to this deadly killer. Sepsis can affect anyone from newborns to the
elderly to hearty twenty-somethings following something as apparently harmless as a scratch or
flu. It is also relatively common after childbirth or surgery. Some have lengthy illnesses and
others are healthy until sepsis strikes. So why have most people never heard of sepsis?
More people have heard of a septic tank than septic shock.
This is unfortunate since septic shock kills millions of people worldwide and very few are
harmed by a septic tank. Septic shock is sepsis at its worst and has a mortality of greater than
50%. In fact, sepsis is the most expensive and preventable medical condition in the world
today. As I learned, there are several reasons why most people have never heard of sepsis.

2. Sepsis is one of the most challenging and deadly illnesses in hospitals across the country.
It often mimics other diseases, is difficult to diagnose and costly to treat. The symptoms of
sepsis include fever, chills, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, pain or discomfort, and
confusion, which are also symptoms of other conditions such as flu, pneumonia, urinary tract
and lung infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sepsis
is a serious medical condition caused by an overwhelming immune response to infection.
Sepsis starts innocuously enough with the immune system recognizing invading bacteria and
mounting its normal response. The immune cells release signaling proteins called cytokines that
help the body to overcome the invading bacteria. However, with sepsis, for reasons not
understood, the immune systems goes into overdrive, releasing more cytokines than needed.
When that happens, the body undergoes a series of changes, including blood clots and leaky
blood vessels that impede blood flow to organs. These immune molecules surging through the
bloodstream are very damaging, causing the blood vessels to slacken, thereby reducing blood
pressure. Blood pressure drops, organ failure occurs, the heart is affected and death can
result.
It is important to remember that sepsis is your body’s reaction to an infection, not an infection
itself and is not contagious. Doctors often order a battery of tests to try to pinpoint the
underlying infection including blood tests, other lab tests and imaging scans if the site of the
infection is hard to pinpoint. With more than 258,000 lives being lost per year, sepsis ranks as
the third leading cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease and cancer.
Most sepsis cases start outside the hospital setting.
Sepsis is the body’s response to an existing infection. Eight out of 10 (79.4%) patients
hospitalized for sepsis were classified as having sepsis onset outside the hospital in a
retrospective medical record review conducted by the CDC. Some of the more common
conditions that develop into sepsis are flu, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and complex
wounds. Seven in 10 sepsis patients previously visited their doctor, or used other healthcare
services, soon before hospitalization or had chronic diseases that required frequent medical
care, highlighting the need for greater sepsis prevention efforts in outpatient medical care.
Every hour that sepsis goes untreated raises the risk of death by 8 per cent. One in five of those
who do survive are left with long-term damage to organs such as kidneys, lungs and the liver.
Until a cure for sepsis is found, early detection is the best hope for survival.
Sepsis has been around for thousands of years but the definition is evolving.
Sepsis was first described by the Egyptians more than 5,000 years ago and given its current
name by the Greek physician Hippocrates about 2,400 years ago. In contrast, the
characterization of its clinical stages and sepsis monitoring tools have changed three times in
the past 25 years, most recently in March 2016. Originally, sepsis was thought to be an internal
rotting or decaying. This was due to the smell of those afflicted and Hippocrates applied the
Greek word for decay-sepsis. Through the years, several stages of sepsis have been defined

3. with the goal being to get ahead of the infection since mortality drops with each stage of the
infection. Understanding how and when to indicate sepsis has been an evolving definition,
making it harder to diagnose. Please read here for more details about the evolving definition
of sepsis.
Sepsis is not caught soon enough and there is no standard approach to diagnosis and
treatment.
If sepsis is suspected, most hospitals perform phenotypic identification of blood infection using
blood culture and Gram staining but the turnaround time is usually delayed, taking four to six
days to receive results. Additionally, not all blood cultures grow well which impair the accuracy
of the identification of the pathogen causing the infection. Time is tissue when dealing with
sepsis so accurate and timely diagnosis is critical. Molecular diagnostics for bacterial
identification from companies like Diatherix, can provide rapid detection and accuracy of the
pathogen. Diatherix’s approach uses a DNA sample to test twenty-nine different organism and
can return the results in as little as two hours. Click here to read more about Diatherix’s
solution. This type of testing is precision medicine at its best, with the ability to determine
whether the infection is bacterial, viral or fungal so that doctors can deliver the best medicine
to stop the infection. Understanding the pathogen sooner could help with over-prescribing
antibiotics or unnecessarily using antibiotics.
Different approaches need to be taken in the identification of sepsis.
While there remains controversy surrounding the definition and treatment of sepsis, key
advances are occurring in the area of early identification. Most healthcare sepsis solutions are
dependent upon EMR data and the use of clinical indicators using rules-based analytics.
Machine learning has the ability to improve the accuracy of the predictions without readjusting
the rules. The New England Journal of Medicine wrote that machine learning would have the
ability to identify conditions like sepsis within ten years. In our work at WPC Healthcare, we
have developed machine-learning algorithms that identify patients in the ER with high
likelihood of having or developing sepsis with greater than 95% accuracy, without the use of
EMR data. This technology is being using in hospitals today and is offering significant timing
advantage to the identification of this deadly killer. Imagine knowing in the ER if you are at
significant risk for sepsis and the clinical team begins accurate identification of the pathogen
and the correct treatment plan. If sepsis can be rapidly detected and treated, the financial cost
and patient suffering will decrease.
Data science approaches like machine-learning, predictive analytics and data mining are
beginning to be applied to healthcare challenges. When sepsis patients are identified earlier
and diagnosed accurately, treatment can begin sooner creating a win-win scenario for
healthcare and patients.