Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Dec;144(6):e20191790.
doi: 10.1542/peds.2019-1790.

A National Approach to Pediatric Sepsis Surveillance

Heather E Hsu  1 , Francisca Abanyie  2 , Michael S D Agus  3 , Fran Balamuth  4 , Patrick W Brady  5 , Richard J Brilli  6 , Joseph A Carcillo  7 , Raymund Dantes  2   8 , Lauren Epstein  2 , Anthony E Fiore  2 , Jeffrey S Gerber  9 , Runa H Gokhale  2 , Benny L Joyner Jr  10 , Niranjan Kissoon  11 , Michael Klompas  12   13 , Grace M Lee  14 , Charles G Macias  15 , Karen M Puopolo  16 , Carmen D Sulton  17 , Scott L Weiss  18 , Chanu Rhee  12   13
Affiliations

A National Approach to Pediatric Sepsis Surveillance

Heather E Hsu et al. Pediatrics. 2019 Dec.

Abstract

Pediatric sepsis is a major public health concern, and robust surveillance tools are needed to characterize its incidence, outcomes, and trends. The increasing use of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States creates an opportunity to conduct reliable, pragmatic, and generalizable population-level surveillance using routinely collected clinical data rather than administrative claims or resource-intensive chart review. In 2015, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recruited sepsis investigators and representatives of key professional societies to develop an approach to adult sepsis surveillance using clinical data recorded in EHRs. This led to the creation of the adult sepsis event definition, which was used to estimate the national burden of sepsis in adults and has been adapted into a tool kit to facilitate widespread implementation by hospitals. In July 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened a new multidisciplinary pediatric working group to tailor an EHR-based national sepsis surveillance approach to infants and children. Here, we describe the challenges specific to pediatric sepsis surveillance, including evolving clinical definitions of sepsis, accommodation of age-dependent physiologic differences, identifying appropriate EHR markers of infection and organ dysfunction among infants and children, and the need to account for children with medical complexity and the growing regionalization of pediatric care. We propose a preliminary pediatric sepsis event surveillance definition and outline next steps for refining and validating these criteria so that they may be used to estimate the national burden of pediatric sepsis and support site-specific surveillance to complement ongoing initiatives to improve sepsis prevention, recognition, and treatment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. 70th World Health Assembly. Improving the prevention, diagnosis and clinical management of sepsis. 2017. Available at: http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA70/A70_R7-en.pdf?ua=1. Accessed January 24, 2019
    1. Kissoon N, Reinhart K, Daniels R, Machado MFR, Schachter RD, Finfer S. Sepsis in children: global implications of the world health assembly resolution on sepsis. Pediatr Crit Care Med. 2017;18(12):e625–e627 - PubMed
    1. Society of Critical Care Medicine. Surviving Sepsis Campaign. 2019. Available at: www.survivingsepsis.org/Pages/default.aspx. Accessed April 1, 2019
    1. Phillips GS, Osborn TM, Terry KM, Gesten F, Levy MM, Lemeshow S. The New York sepsis severity score: development of a risk-adjusted severity model for sepsis. Crit Care Med. 2018;46(5):674–683 - PubMed
    1. Illinois General Assembly. Public Act 099-0828. 2016. Available at: www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/fulltext.asp?Name=099-0828. Accessed March 5, 2019

Publication types