ALBANY – HCA, IPRO, HANYS, the Rory Staunton Foundation for Sepsis Prevention,Sepsis Alliance, and nine additional partner organizations are holding a first-of-its-kind All-Sector Sepsis Summit for health care organizations and representatives on October 3 in Albany.
Registration, a program agenda and additional information are here.
Media are invited to learn more about the human toll and health care implications of sepsis. (Media announcements about the event are also appreciated.)
The daylong program at the Albany Hilton includes top state health officials, physician experts, representatives of all health sectors, public policy and education partners, and quality and clinical experts. Capital Region media representative Benita Zahn, an anchor at WNYT NewsChannel 13, is also among the scheduled speakers.
The Summit’s goal is to promote a true “continuum response” to sepsis, an emergency condition where collaboration and timing are critical to saving health, lives and catastrophic cost.
According to Sepsis Alliance, sepsis is the leading cause of death in U.S. hospitals, resulting in more fatalities than prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDS combined, claiming a life every two minutes and over a quarter-million U.S. lives each year. Sepsis also accounts for $27 billion in all hospital costs; but over 80 percent of all sepsis-related infections originate in the home and community, providing enormous opportunity for prevention.
The October 3 Summit is supported in part from a New York State Health Foundation grant that has bolstered HCA’s effort to train home care providers to screen, identify and assist cases using HCA’s new sepsis tool in the home and community setting where nurses have contact with at-risk sepsis patients. This effort has been coordinated by HCA and IPRO, the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for New York State, over the past several months.
New York has led the way in sepsis screening and identification efforts on the institutional side. In 2013, as a result of the advocacy of the Rory Staunton Foundation and its partners, New York became the first state in the nation to implement mandatory evidence-based protocols for the early diagnosis and treatment of sepsis in hospitals. The protocols are known as “Rory’s Regulations,” named for 12-year-old Rory Staunton who died of sepsis in April 2012 because a scrape during a regular gym class at his school was noticed but not treated.
Both the home care screening tool created by HCA and the hospital protocols utilize consistent evidence-based criteria, and this summit provides a venue to reinforce this compatible approach to sepsis identification, protocols and treatment across the full range of health care services and insurance models, including home care, hospitals, EMS services, physician practices, nursing homes, managed care plans, and others.
For more information, contact:
Roger Noyes
Home Care Association of New York State (HCA)
(518) 810-0665 (office)
(518) 275-6961 (cell)