Learning Objective #1: List the key concepts of early goal-directed therapy for treatment of the patient with sepsis

Learning Objective #2: Summarize how our multidisciplinary team worked collaboratively to develop and initiate a sepsis protocol

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Sepsis is a prevalent disease that is responsible for significant morbidity, mortality, and costs to patients in the healthcare system. Mortality in septic shock has decreased only slightly between 1970 and the late 1990s; it remains the most frequent cause of death in non-cardiac intensive care units (ICUs). Therapies have been identified in the past few years that have been shown to improve survivability in these patients. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Massachusetts, caregivers identified an opportunity to improve outcomes by initiating aggressive treatment protocols early in the hospital course of patients presenting with sepsis. A multidisciplinary team made up of nurses and physicians developed and put into practice a nurse-driven, evidence-based protocol that incorporates these proven therapies. The protocol is based on consensus criteria from the best available literature to standardize treatment for patients with sepsis. The team's goals were: 1. to develop a multidisciplinary, evidence-based protocol that would allow for rapid identification and early triage of patients into the protocol, and 2. to educate and empower the nurses to manage the septic patient by using the protocol. Long-term goals include data collection on the first 160 patients enrolled in the protocol and compare this data with historic data using retrospective chart reviews. We are still in the data collection phase of the study, but we hope to ultimately show how rapid identification of patients with sepsis and early goal-directed therapy will decrease 28-day mortality, ventilator hours, ICU and hospital length of stay, and overall costs. In this oral presentation we will present an overview of the process of development and implementation of our sepsis protocol and preliminary data on how we have improved time to identifying patients with sepsis.