A hospital algorithm designed to predict a deadly condition misses most cases - The Verge

The biggest electronic health record company in the United States, Epic Systems, claims it can solve a major problem for hospitals: identifying signs of sepsis, an often deadly complication from infections that can lead to organ failure.

Epic says its alert system can correctly differentiate patients who do and don’t have sepsis 76 percent of the time.

Around a quarter of US hospitals use Epic’s electronic medical records, and hundreds of hospitals use its sepsis prediction tool, including the health center at the University of Michigan, where study author Karandeep Singh is an assistant professor.

Patients developed sepsis in 2,552 of those hospitalizations.

Epic’s sepsis tool missed 1,709 of those cases, around two-thirds of which were still identified and treated quickly.

It only identified 7 percent of sepsis cases that were missed by a physician.