Sepsis as the primary admitting diagnosis of transferred patients who died within 48 hours of arrival at a Central Texas hospital

Abstract

Interhospital transfers are independently associated with inpatient mortality, and transferred patients have worse outcomes. The aim of this study was to retrospectively assess the 48-hour mortality rate in interhospital transfer cohorts of all transfers to a Central Texas teaching hospital and to identify a primary admitting diagnosis for potential intervention. A total of 15,435 patients with 19,161 transfers over the course of the study were retrospectively reviewed and placed in 18 different categories based upon the primary admitting diagnosis. There were about 5000 transfer patients yearly with ∼1.4% deaths within 48 hours of arrival. The three leading categories for transferred patients were cardiovascular, neurologic, and psychiatric. In this group, 268 of 19,161 transfers died within 48 hours of arrival. Despite being the 10th leading category for transfer, sepsis was the leading primary admitting diagnosis of patients who died within 48 hours of arrival, accounting for nearly 22% of those patients. Given the significant association found between sepsis and 48-hour mortality after transfer, we devised a novel interhospital transfer checklist based upon the Surviving Sepsis guidelines in an attempt to decrease mortality associated with these transfers.

Keywords:

• Checklist
• interhospital transfers
• mortality
• sepsis
• shock