Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today that POC Advisor™, its real-time clinical surveillance and analytics platform, will be deployed by Rush University Medical Center (RUMC) as part of the hospital’s ongoing effort to improve sepsis outcomes. POC Advisor aggregates, normalizes and analyzes patient data from disparate clinical systems to deliver timely and highly accurate sepsis alerts and patient-specific advice to clinicians at the point of care.
Ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the nation’s top academic medical centers, RUMC will deploy POC Advisor to reduce sepsis rates by enabling diagnosis at the earliest, most treatable stages. Sepsis, the body’s overwhelming response to infection, is often fatal to patients if clinicians don’t begin treatment in a timely manner.
“For decades, the medical community has struggled to improve sepsis outcomes, in part because the condition’s initial symptoms mimic several common illnesses, but also because today’s EHRs cannot support the enterprise-level surveillance required to impact sepsis rates,” said Brian Patty, MD, Vice President of Clinical Systems and CMIO for RUMC, which holds a four-star quality rating by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and is ranked as one of 2016’s Most Wired hospitals by Hospitals & Health Networks. “POC Advisor will help the Rush team overcome the challenges inherent in early identification, enabling timelier and more accurate diagnoses for faster and more effective treatments. This will, in turn, reduce the severity of sepsis and the number of associated deaths.”
POC Advisor uses real-time clinical surveillance and analytics to deliver timely and accurate sepsis alerts and advice. Hundreds of rules built into the platform account for possible comorbidities and medication abnormalities, and trigger alerts that have demonstrated unprecedented levels of sensitivity (95%) and specificity (82%) as published in a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). That study also found that POC Advisor reduced sepsis mortality and sepsis-related 30-day readmissions by 53% and 30%, respectively.
“RUMC has an inspiring history of innovation and leveraging the latest technologies to improve care quality and patient safety,” said Sean Benson, Vice President & General Manager for POC Advisor at Wolters Kluwer Clinical Software Solutions. “We are pleased that POC Advisor was selected to help Rush achieve its sepsis reduction goals within this nationally recognized hospital.”
