Sepsis Alliance announced the National Sepsis Registry Initiative (NSRI), an independent, consensus-driven, multi-stakeholder advocacy initiative.
A National Sepsis Registry of sepsis-relevant clinical and claims information will help researchers, patients, and caregivers improve sepsis diagnosis, treatment, and survivor care. Sepsis, the body’s overwhelming and uncontrolled response to infection, remains both the leading cause of death in U.S. hospitals and the most expensive in-patient cost (270,000 lives lost to sepsis every year). Healthcare providers face enormous challenges in diagnosing and treating sepsis, which Sepsis Alliance clinical contributors have called “an epidemic hiding in plain sight.”
In cancer, the Centers for Disease Control’s National Program of Cancer Registries contributed to impressive progress in outcomes, with over 1.7 million cancer cases registered annually. No such infrastructure has been created for reporting, tracking, or sharing sepsis-related information at the national level. Clinicians working to detect, diagnose, and treat sepsis need a platform for comprehensive, consistent reporting of sepsis data. Without the full picture that a national registry provides, clinicians are fighting what they can’t fully see.
A National Sepsis Registry has the potential to play a key role in the fight for equity in sepsis care, illuminating disparities in patient diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes. It can also promote antimicrobial stewardship, equipping innovators with the data essential to developing new drugs, and physicians with state-of-the-art guidance on what works best for a given sepsis patient.
The NSRI is committed to addressing the critical lack of organized, sepsis-relevant data. A National Sepsis Registry, with privacy-protected, patient-specific, longitudinal, all-site-of-care data represents an essential next step to enable better diagnosis, outcomes, equity, innovation, and quality of care for patients with sepsis. To accomplish this, NSRI is promoting legislation to create the registry and engaging stakeholders in its implementation and use.
