DNP, Kent State University, 2022, College of Nursing

Nearly 1.7 million adults are diagnosed with sepsis each year in America. If sepsis is not identified and treated rapidly, it can cause permanent organ damage and death. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) developed a core measure that is separated into a three-hour and a six-hour bundle to assist hospitals with the timely treatment of sepsis (Levy et al., 2018). The outcomes of this core measure are publicly reported by hospitals. Compliance with sepsis bundles has been shown to decrease mortality and improve outcomes. At a large teaching hospital in northeastern Ohio, compliance with the sepsis bundle core measure was 58.8% from June 2020 – September 2020 which is below the target rate of 75%. The reasons for this are multifactorial, but include delayed sepsis recognition, documentation insufficiency, and communication hand off failure. To help improve compliance, an Interdisciplinary Code Sepsis Team was implemented on October 19, 2020. This Rapid Cycle Quality Improvement project used the Plan-Do-Study-Act method to evaluate documentation compliance of the elements of the sepsis bundle after the implementation of the Interdisciplinary Code Sepsis Team.

Committee: Lisa Onesko (Advisor); Kimberly Cleveland (Committee Member); Marilyn Nibling (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care