Sepsis is notorious for starting out in silence. There may be a subtle change in blood pressure. Urine output may decrease. The heart rate may start to creep up. Too often, none of these are sufficient to raise the attention of busy doctors and nurses caring for hospitalized patients.

Inflammatory markers in the blood may begin to wave the red flag, but the findings are often nonspecific, and they can only be appreciated if they are part of the patient’s orders.

By the time the body’s overwhelming response to an infection shows itself to busy hospital staff, doctors and nurses may already find themselves too far behind in treatment. In fact, the most frightening thing about sepsis is that it can spiral out of control before care providers even make the diagnosis.

But what if a hospital’s computerized medical record system could pick up on subtle changes in the information already being collected and stored?

Sepsis is a condition caused by the body’s own inflammatory response. It kills as many as 30% of its victims, who go into shock and their organs begin to fail. Saving these patients requires immediate recognition of the condition and action to head it off.

Engineering experts at Johns Hopkins University are using artificial intelligence (AI) to scour the data entered into electronic medical records of hospital patients, looking for subtle trends that could signal the onset of sepsis. The results show that the system can help diagnose sepsis as much as 24 hours earlier than relying on doctors and nurses to pick up on trends.

The system, called targeted real-time early warning score (TREWScore), offers just one way for clinicians to use “big data” and artificial intelligence to help prevent unnecessary deaths caused by slow recognition and treatment of sepsis and other deadly conditions.

Patients and their families can also help in the fight against sepsis. Rather than depending solely on hospital providers (or AI systems), look for the cardinal signs of sepsis, and speak up of you are concerned. The most common outward signs are fever, chills, rapid breathing and heart rate, rash, confusion and disorientation. A patient may have some but not all of the signs.

Read more about the signs of sepsis here:

[Sepsis Fact Sheet](https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/factsheet_sepsis.aspx)