The Challenge: Sepsis is the number three killer in America and likely the number one killer worldwide. Hospitals in America spend $20 billion per year combating it. And yet, this “run-away” reaction of the immune system regularly claims limbs and lives in a matter of days.

The Mission: Utilizing Web 2.0 collaborative techniques, the Sepsis Alliance and the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research seek to build a worldwide effort to track and define Sepsis in order to enable development of cures. This will be accomplished with Sepsis Watch, a system that will link advanced medical systems and caregivers in the west with those battling sepsis in the third-world.

Advancements: New technological developments from Microsoft, LOESER, Philips and others can identify Septic events at the bedside in real time. At present, the technology is costly, the information is isolated, and the units operate only in highly developed countries. Hospital systems are able to implement comprehensive Sepsis training and management programs, but few choose to do so.

The Missing Link: Sepsis Watch will pool worldwide data by offering free, 24/7 access to an ever-expanding, self-refining online database/algorithm into which patient physiological markers are regularly entered either manually or electronically. Early warnings of potential septic events will be issued based upon algorithmic analysis. On-going event-tracking information will be delivered.

Bridge to a Cure: Beyond the obvious and immediate value of early warnings and tracking information, the Sepsis Watch database will produce a fundamental cornerstone for building a cure for Sepsis; without this, a cure will never be found. What is needed is a true and complete characterization of Sepsis. This is not a new problem; for many years there has been a clear mandate to define differing forms of sepsis, rather than the current standard lumping together all comers. It has not been possible to do this, because the data necessary to distinguish patients into subsets has never been collected and studied. The problem has to be defined before it can be solved. Understanding the profile of Septic patients will guide human trials of investigational devices and pharmaceuticals. There is consensus that previous trials have failed because we have not defined the problem of sepsis, or distinguished the patients.

The Collaboration: The Sepsis Alliance and the Feinstein Institute will focus attention and build design consensus by expanding its ongoing Centricity Series: Sepsis, a series of lectures, available online, describing state-of-the-art research efforts in sepsis. Researchers, clinicians and caregivers battling to save lives in the bush will participate in web enabled conferences and engage in a “Wiki” collaboration to produce the Sepsis Watch schedule of physiological markers, input mechanisms, algorithmic design and output mechanisms.

The Pilot Program: Registered Nurses (RNs), trained via the Internet and certified by St. Petersburg College, will be placed in the North Shore LIJ Hospital System as dedicated Sepsis Watch Teams. Caregivers in the remote reaches of Madagascar will also be Sepsis Watch certified and installed by Alliance Partner Maventy Health International. Sepsis Watch Teams will be responsible for entering physiological markers into the Sepsis Watch database. Teams will supply an on-going critique of the developing system from their highly disparate “real world” perspectives and be an important part of the refinement and evaluative processes.

Through the efforts of Alliance Partner, the University of South Florida and Dr. John Sinnott, relationships with hospitals and remote service organizations are currently being built in India, South Korea and Thailand.