Maternal sepsis detection tools added to MEDITECH’s Sepsis Management Toolkit

Detecting maternal sepsis is especially challenging. According to Sepsis Alliance, many of the changes that happen during pregnancy – elevated heart and respiration rates, for example – are the same ones that alert clinicians to signs of infection. To help care teams identify and treat sepsis in pregnant patients more quickly, MEDITECH has added maternal sepsis detection tools to its Sepsis Management Toolkit.  

“Sepsis is a leading cause of maternal mortality in the US,” said MEDITECH Senior Analyst Dan Seltzer, lead author of the Sepsis Management Toolkit. "We decided to take a more discerning approach to help clinicians identify sepsis in specific populations because signs and symptoms can vary. This is especially true for pregnant patients.” 

Specifically, the toolkit now includes screening tools for nurses to identify sepsis in patients who are 20 weeks pregnant through three days postpartum. These assessments align with recent updates to CMS guidance on maternal sepsis. 

“With the toolkit’s new screening assessments, labor and delivery teams will have more sophisticated sepsis detection tools that find this condition more easily,” said Seltzer. 

Interested in how MEDITECH’s EHR alerts care teams to patients who may be experiencing changes associated with sepsis? Take a look at our Sepsis Management Toolkit and Surveillance web pages for resources that can help.