The Home Care Association of New York State is on a mission to help home care and home healthcare agencies nationwide prevent hospitalizations and deaths from sepsis.
“With sepsis, every hour there is a treatment delay, there is an 8% increase in mortality. It can move very swiftly,” Home Care Association of New York State President Al Cardillo told McKnight’s Home Care Daily.
Cardillo’s association developed a tool four years ago that helps clinicians and personal care workers identify patients at risk of developing the life-threatening condition that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says kills 270,000 Americans annually.
“There was a lot of testing on the tool,” Cardillo said. “The initiative that we put together was also incorporated in a [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] pilot in New York where over 10,000 clinicians were trained with the tool, so it has had a lot of runway.”
Sepsis is a potentially lethal condition that develops when the body’s response to an infection damages other organs and tissues. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 1.7 million people develop the condition each year, with up to 90% of cases starting outside of hospitals.
In 2013, New York passed regulations requiring hospitals to develop protocols to quickly identify and treat sepsis. The tool the state’s home care association rolled out in 2017 aligns with that initiative. It provides home healthcare clinicians with a set of protocols to follow to assess whether a patient might have sepsis or is at risk of developing it.
“Operating along with that assessment is a clinical algorithm that advises the clinician about next steps,” Cardillo explained.
The association also developed a separate educational tool that will help families and personal care workers identify warning signs for sepsis.
Agencies in 55 out of New York’s 62 counties have been using the tool, Cardillo said. Although he couldn’t estimate how many patients have benefited from it over the past four years, he said that one New York home healthcare agency estimated that the tool has prevented hospitalizations for 69% of its patients who tested positive for sepsis.
The Home Care Association of New York has shared its sepsis tool with home care associations in Illinois, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, as well as with agencies in several other states. Home care and home healthcare agencies can get information about the tool at [email protected].
