Keep on Playing | A Sepsis Awareness Month Story

By: Natalie Cheng

September 8th 2021

September is Sepsis Awareness Month. Sepsis claims 270,000 lives a year in the United States. For every hour that it goes undetected in a patient, mortality increases by 10%. Sepsis Awareness month is all about creating visibility for a condition that affects so many, and this month we will be sharing stories of how it has impacted members of our customer community.

Here’s an account of how sepsis affected a customer’s child’s piano teacher; in her words:

“With Sagitta, compliance has increased dramatically and there have been patients that have been treated sooner as a result. One of them was my children’s piano teacher. She was at the brink of death when she presented to the Howard Memorial Hospital (HMH) ER. She didn’t have an obvious infection, but when she was screened and a lab was performed, it was obvious that she was heading into septic shock. Her doctors at CHI told her that if the staff at HMH hadn’t recognized that she was experiencing a sepsis condition, she would have died. The doctor told her that the appropriate information was communicated by HMH to them so that she was treated appropriately when she got there. He told her that at CHI, he believed her issue could have easily been missed because it wasn’t easily recognizable.

The piano teacher had a perforated colon that they didn’t recognize until she had been there for two days. They were giving her antibiotics and fluids, but she wasn’t improving. They did an exploratory lap and she had feces all throughout her abdomen. Her friend told me the surgery seemed to last forever. She has a colostomy now and has resumed teaching piano, drums, guitar, and singing lessons. She will have it reversed next week. She had to go to rehab as well. She had a long stay at the hospital, but she attributes her still living to the fact that God still had work for her to do and HMH had figured out she was septic. It’s stories like those that we need to share more with the nursing staff. This one is just really personal to me.”

Sepsis is the #1 cause of death in hospitals. At Luminare, we’re fighting sepsis with software. Our sepsis workflow accelerator, Sagitta, detects and treats patients faster. If you’re a hospital or healthcare provider looking for a solution to better treat sepsis, please reach out to us.