Can health tech help? Sepsis, according to the CDC, is “a complication caused by the body’s overwhelming and life-threatening response to infection, which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death.” It often happens when another underlying condition is occurring, but which cannot be located, but the sepsis is overwhelming and must be treated first. The sepsis has to be treated quickly, or else the patient winds up being a statistic, or worse, disabled or dead. The UK Sepsis Trust estimates 37,000 annual deaths (derived from an extrapolated dataset provided to the UK Sepsis Trust by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) in 2006) with an estimated 200,000 cases per year. In the US, the estimate is over a million cases a year (NIH). Worldwide, it may be 15-19 million cases. The odds are that sepsis may have touched you, a family member, friend or someone you know. (For this Editor, two in the past six months–and one did not make it.)

There may be a treatment that is both effective and cost-effective, a combination that is hard to beat. It was developed on the ICU front lines at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital (Norfolk General), located in Norfolk, Virginia. An ICU physician, Dr. Paul Marik, who is also chief of pulmonary and critical care at Eastern Virginia Medical School, had read journal articles on treating sepsis with IV infusions of vitamin C. For a patient sinking fast, to the vitamin C infusion he added hydrocortisone to bring down inflammation. (more…)