Surveillance and Epidemiology

The SEPSIS Center conducts cutting-edge research using electronic health record (EHR) data to improve sepsis surveillance and advance large-scale epidemiologic studies. Our faculty's work has transformed how sepsis is monitored by hospitals, researchers, public health officials, and policymakers.  Key contributions include:

• Revealing biases in sepsis estimates and trends based on administrative data due to evolving and inconsistent diagnosis and coding practices   
• Developing an objective EHR-based surveillance definition for sepsis that improves consistency and reliability over administrative data. Our definition underlies CDC’s Adult Sepsis Event surveillance strategy   
• Integrating clinical data from hundreds of hospitals to produce the CDC’s definitive estimate of sepsis incidence and outcomes in the U.S.
• Characterizing the prevalence, underlying causes, and preventability of sepsis-associated deaths in U.S. hospitals   
• Analyzing trends in the prevalence of resistant organisms and broad-spectrum antibiotic use for suspected sepsis    
• Advancing our understanding of SARS-CoV-2-associated sepsis during the COVID-19 pandemic and developing surveillance metrics for viral sepsis   
• Elucidating the epidemiology and outcomes of hospital-onset sepsis and how it differs from community-onset sepsis
• Identifying risk factors for sepsis mortality and describing trends in sepsis epidemiology among key patient subgroups, including previously healthy individuals, patients with opioid use disorders, and patients with cancer.