This Ohio health system tested an AI tool to predict sepsis. Here's how it went

Katie Palmer covers telehealth, clinical artificial intelligence, and the health data economy — with an emphasis on the impacts of digital health care for patients, providers, and businesses. You can reach Katie on Signal at palmer.01.

Across emergency departments around Akron, Ohio, physicians were getting overwhelmed. In 2021, Summa Health, a community health system with four emergency rooms in the region, was using an alert system built into its electronic health record to flag patients who were likely to develop sepsis, a rapidly developing, life-threatening condition. 

“Sepsis can be so subtle that you don’t even know,” said Michelle Evans, Summa’s sepsis program coordinator. “We can see patients sit on the floor for a couple days, and they go into shock before anybody realizes what it is.” 

But Summa’s alert system generated so many flags — as many as 80,000 every month — that they couldn’t tell which were worth acting on. Mostly, they got ignored.