Does Improving Care Team Communication Reduce Delay in Response among Critically Ill Surgical Patients with Abdominal Sepsis?

Intensive Care Units (ICU) have the highest mortality rates in the hospital and account for 500,000 deaths annually in the US. Surgical ICU care structure is particularly complex because patient care is shared between intensivist and surgical teams. Care team communication is critical to effectively diagnose and treatment response without delay to prevent mortality. Effective care team communication has been shown to improve outcomes in critically ill surgical patients. With the support of NMIC in 2020 our team demonstrated implemented use of HIPAA compliant interprofessional messaging application (VOCERA) was associated with a 0.05 odds reduction in mortality (95% Confidence Interval = - 0.01- -0.09) and 0.03 odds reduction in venous thromboembolism (95% Confidence Interval = -0.01- -0.04). We now propose to determine how VOCERA, used amongst physicians and nurses, was associated with reduction in mortality to best leverage VOCERA technology to improve systemwide NM outcomes.