Jackson hospital adopts new test to detect life-threatening condition

St. Dominic’s Hospital is implementing an innovative test in its emergency department to detect sepsis, a body’s overreaction to infection that causes the immune system to attack its tissues and organs and is a leading cause of death in hospitals in the U.S.

The IntelliSep test runs a sample of blood through a machine to measure a patient’s likelihood of having sepsis. The machine squishes the white blood cells. It determines whether someone is not septic, possibly septic, or likely septic based on whether the cells flatten out or bounce back.

“For every hour delay in treating sepsis, there’s an increase in mortality by 8%,” said St. Dominic’s chief medical officer Dr. Terry Dyess. “It’s the number one cause of death in hospitals, it’s the number one cause of readmissions to hospitals, and about one in every three patients that come through the hospital have sepsis,” she said. 

Sepsis affects approximately 1.7 million adults in the United States each year and potentially contributes to more than 250?000 deaths, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study using data from 2009-2014..

Sepsis is difficult to detect in part because its symptoms – higher or lower body temperature, fatigue, pain, sleepiness, and more – are so general. 

“Because we didn’t have this test to determine whether or not it’s sepsis so early on, you would kind of be forced to throw the kitchen sink at it to prevent the patient from deteriorating in the off chance that it is sepsis,” said Dan Woods, a registered nurse and senior director of Emergency Services and Hospital Throughput for St. Dominica. 

Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health, which owns St. Dominic, and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center developed IntelliSep with Cytovale, a medical diagnostics company.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the IntelliSep in December 2022. It was first implemented at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2023. Earlier this month, Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Health Network began using it in their emergency departments as well.