Early Physician Gestalt Versus Usual Screening Tools for the Prediction of Sepsis in Critically Ill Emergency Patients

Abstract

ObjectiveCompare physician gestalt to existing screening tools for the identification of sepsis in the initial minutes of presentation when time sensitive treatments must be initiated. MethodsThis prospective observational study conducted with consecutive encounter sampling took place in the emergency department of an academic, urban, safety net hospital between September 2020 and May 2022. The study population included critically ill emergency department patients excluding traumas, transfers, and self-evident diagnoses. Emergency physician gestalt was measured using a visual analog scale (VAS) from 0-100 at 15 and 60 minutes after patient arrival. The primary outcome was an explicit sepsis hospital discharge diagnosis. Clinical data were recorded up to 3 hours to compare Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS), Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), quick SOFA (qSOFA), Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) and a logistic regression machine learning model utilizing Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) for variable selection. The screening tools were compared utilizing ROC analysis and calculation of AUC. Results2,484 patient-physician encounters involving 59 attending physicians were analyzed. 275 patients (11%) received an explicit sepsis discharge diagnosis. When limited to available data at 15 minutes, initial VAS (AUC 0.90; 95% CI 0.88-0.92) outperformed all tools including LASSO (0.84, 95% CI 0.82-0.87), qSOFA (0.67; 95% CI 0.64-0.71), SIRS (0.67; 95% 0.64-0.70), SOFA (0.67; 95% CI 0.63-0.70) and MEWS (0.66; 95% CI 0.64-0.69). Expanding to data available at 60 minutes did not meaningfully change results. ConclusionsAmong adults presenting to an emergency department with an undifferentiated critical illness, physician gestalt in the first 15 minutes of the encounter outperformed other screening methods in identifying sepsis.