- Letter
- Open access
- Published:
State-level hospital compliance with and performance in the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services’ Early Management Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock Bundle
Critical Care volume 23, Article number: 92 (2019)
A recent article by Barbash et al. reported on the first publically available, 2017 data of United States (US) hospital performance on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) “Early Management Bundle for Severe Sepsis/Septic Shock” (SEP-1) quality measure [1]. They demonstrate that 87% of hospitals reported SEP-1 data, at an average compliance with all elements of the bundle of 49% (standard deviation (SD) 19%). In addition to their demonstrating the hospital characteristics associated with high SEP-1 performance, an aggregated state-level description is an important complimentary analysis given the state-specific sepsis quality mandates and initiatives existing and forthcoming. Specifically, pre-dating SEP-1 and beginning in 2014, New York required hospitals to implement sepsis care protocols. Also at the time of writing, Illinois and New Jersey are adopting similar mandates while Ohio and Wisconsin are adopting sepsis public health initiatives [2,3,4].
In our analysis, we utilized a different, larger denominator file of the 4793 hospitals in the CMS Hospital General Information dataset, resulting in a lower proportion (63% vs. 87% in Barbash et al.) of national hospitals with complete reporting of SEP-1 from January 1 to December 31, 2017. Despite this difference, we demonstrated the same national hospital SEP-1 performance at a national mean of 50% (SD 19%). Aggregating the data at the level of the 56 states and territories available, the percent of each state’s hospitals that were compliant with SEP-1 reporting requirements ranged from 16% (North Dakota) to 100% (Rhode Island and Virgin Islands), at an average of 63% (SD 9%). This is comparable to the national average but with a standard deviation demonstrating wide state variation in individual state’s hospital reporting compliance. Furthermore, this variation appears geographically clustered, with lower reporting throughout the north-central part of the continental US (Fig. 1). In regard to each state’s average hospital performance in SEP-1 bundle compliance, the states’ mean hospital SEP-1 performance ranged from 9% (Virgin Islands) to 63% (Hawaii) around a state average of 48% (SD 9%), comparable to the national mean of all hospitals but with a narrower standard deviation. In contrast to states’ hospital reporting compliance, states’ mean SEP-1 scores do not appear to visually cluster within the continental US (Fig. 2)
These data demonstrate that there is a similar magnitude of variation between states' SEP-1 reporting compliance and performance (SD 9% for both). (Table 1). By the time of this analysis, New York’s hospitals’ reporting compliance with overlapping SEP-1 measure was relatively high, with 82% of hospitals completing SEP-1 reporting. However, New York’s hospitals’ performance in completing the patient-care components of the SEP-1 bundle was just below the national average with 47% (SD 17%) of the state’s hospitals’ sampled SEP-1 patients receiving all components of the SEP− 1 bundle. It remains to be seen whether specific state mandates and initiatives have an impact in addition to the national mandates.
Abbreviations
- CMS:
-
Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services
- SD:
-
Standard deviation
- SEP-1:
-
“Early Management Bundle for Severe Sepsis/Septic Shock” sepsis quality care bundle
- US:
-
United States of America
References
Barbash IJ, Davis B, Kahn JM. National performance on the Medicare SEP-1 Sepsis Quality Measure. Crit Care Med. 2018. [Epub ahead of print].
New York State Department of Health Office of Quality and Patient Safety. New York State Report on Sepsis Care Improvement Initiative: hospital quality performance [Available from: https://www.health.ny.gov/press/reports/docs/2015_sepsis_care_improvement_initiative.pdf. Accessed 17 Dec 2018.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. State policy approaches to sepsis prevention and early recognition [Available from: https://www.cdc.gov/hai/pdfs/sepsis/vs-sepsis-policy-final.pdf. Accessed 17 Dec 2018.
Sepsis Alliance. New Jersey now one of three states to mandate sepsis protocols [Available from: https://www.sepsis.org/sepsis-in-the-news/new-jersey-now-one-three-states-mandate-sepsis-protocols/. Accessed 17 Dec 2018.
Acknowledgements
Not applicable.
Funding
During this work Dr. Kempker received support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [K08HS025240] and the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [L30 HL124529-01].
Availability of data and materials
Data are freely available at https://data.medicare.gov/data/hospital-compare. By time of publication these data may have been moved into the archive at https://data.medicare.gov/data/archives/hospital-compare.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
JAK analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript. GSM, HEW, MRK, and LAW contributed to the project development, analysis, and interpretation and edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate
Not applicable.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
About this article
Cite this article
Kempker, J.A., Kramer, M.R., Waller, L.A. et al. State-level hospital compliance with and performance in the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services’ Early Management Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock Bundle. Crit Care 23, 92 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-019-2382-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-019-2382-0