Across emergency departments around Akron, Ohio, physicians were getting overwhelmed. In 2021, Summa Health, a community health system with four emergency rooms in the region, was using an alert system built into its electronic health record to flag patients who were likely to develop sepsis, a rapidly developing, life-threatening condition.
“Sepsis can be so subtle that you don’t even know,” said Michelle Evans, Summa’s sepsis program coordinator. “We can see patients sit on the floor for a couple days, and they go into shock before anybody realizes what it is.”
But Summa’s alert system generated so many flags — as many as 80,000 every month — that they couldn’t tell which were worth acting on. Mostly, they got ignored.
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