Why Can't Epic's AI model Detect Sepsis? (opens in new tab)

I used to work in emergency medicine as a paramedic. A far cry from an MD for sure, but here's my two cents: Unless they were already in decline, I never suspected Sepsis based solely on vitals. It was usually more of a gut feel thing. It can present with weird symptoms, like unexplained joint pain in multiple joints and things like that. I think that two key tells are patient history and patient cognition relative to baseline. My favorite question to ask family is: "How are they normally?" It's hard to measure these things with vitals so the AI doesn't have the right data going in, IMO. But, take all this with a grain of salt as I am deeply uninformed on the subject.

The title is misleading and wrong. "AI" from a specific company(Epic) can't detect sepsis. But technology exists from people that known what they are doing, such as Johns Hopkin's spin-off Bayesian [1], and they have been very successful in detecting Sepsis.

[1] https://www.bayesianhealth.com

It looks like Duke University School Of Medicine figured it out. https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/dukes-augmented-i...

(after I posted this, the title of this story has changed to be EPIC-specific - it was "Why Can't AI Detect Sepsis?")

> Why Can't AI Detect Sepsis?

> (...)

> The details of ESM's development is proprietary

That last word is why.

Granted this is the review of a single model, but given that it's by one of the big players in the EMR space, it shows how challenging this problem is. Sepsis is easy to under-recognise, and difficult to identify reliably without lots (and lots) of false alarms.

I think this headline is slightly misleading since the writeup doesn't really go into the "why" or generalize past Epic's performance.

The TLDR is much more accurate: "A widely used sepsis prediction tool demonstrated poor performance in an independent validation, with worse results than clinician judgement and an increased burden of alert fatigue."