Health Information Management

A Note from the Director: ACDIS Advisory Board responds to new definitions of sepsis, septic shock

CDI Strategies, March 31, 2016

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As reported in the March 3 edition of CDI Strategies a joint U.S. and international task force recently revised the definitions of sepsis and septic shock. The new definitions and revised criteria were published in the Feb. 23 Journal of the American Medical Association .

The new definitions of sepsis and septic shock are quite different from current definitions and significantly raise the bar for diagnosis. More or less, the task force equates this new definition of sepsis (Sepsis-3) with what was once “severe sepsis,” and also implemented a Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) for its diagnosis, as well as Quick SOFA (qSOFA) bedside criteria for patients likely to have sepsis.
 
Since publication of this news, ACDIS has not been idle. We covered the news first on the March 2 ACDIS Radio with Dr. Richard Pinson and Dr. James Kennedy.
 
Then, led by the efforts of Dr. Sam Antonios, the ACDIS Advisory Board drafted a response for the ACDIS membership, summarizing the new changes and issuing some recommendations for how members should address them in their institutions and published the position paper New Definitions of Sepsis and Septic Shock: Response from the ACDIS Advisory Board.
 
Finally, Antonios on behalf of the ACDIS Advisory Board recently followed up with the principal authors of The Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3) in a subsequent letter that details some of the documentation and coding issues the new definitions have raised. We hope that the task force responds in a meaningful way that we can share with you, the ACDIS membership. ACDIS plans to publish this letter in an upcoming issue of CDI Journal.
 
I’d like to thank our ACDIS Advisory Board members for their work in responding to the new definitions. And to our members, please stay tuned for further information and guidance from ACDIS on this important issue.
 
All the best,
Brian Murphy, ACDIS Director
bmurphy@acdis.org



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