Epic Sepsis Model

Incidents and issues 🔥

• August 2023. Atrium Health research study found that Epic’s product was more accurate at the highest scoring thresholds, when it was most confident that a patient had sepsis. However, it also found that those thresholds were only reached after clinicians had already taken steps to treat the condition. 

• February 2022. Stat published the findings of a research study conducted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that small shifts in data fed into well-known health care algorithms, including the Epic Sepsis Model can cause their accuracy to degrade over time. Instead of transforming care, the study found, the algorithms are unable to keep pace with fast-moving clinical conditions, potentially resulting in mis-diagnoses and raising the prospect AI could do more harm than good. Epic Systems later said it had overhauled its sepsis prediction model to improve its accuracy and make its alerts more meaningful to clinicians. It also said it had changed its definition of sepsis to match the international consensus definition.

• June 2021. Study: Epic sepsis model misses two-thirds of cases