Benchmarking the Incidence and Mortality of Severe Sepsis in the United States*

In 1992, the first consensus definition of severe sepsis was published. Subsequent epidemiologic estimates were collected using administrative data, but ongoing discrepancies in the definition of severe sepsis produced large differences in estimates.

We seek to describe the variations in incidence and mortality of severe sepsis in the United States using four methods of database abstraction. We hypothesized that different methodologies of capturing cases of severe sepsis would result in disparate estimates of incidence and mortality. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS: Using a nationally representative sample, four previously published methods (Angus et al, Martin et al, Dombrovskiy et al, and Wang et al) were used to gather cases of severe sepsis over a 6-year period (2004-2009). In addition, the use of new International Statistical Classification of Diseases, 9th Edition (ICD-9), sepsis codes was compared with previous methods. MEASUREMENTS: Annual national incidence and in-hospital mortality of severe sepsis.