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Comment by zbyforgotp | Hacker News Reader

Just to be precise. The sepsis alarm was not blocking x-ray or antibiotics but rather suggesting them.

“”” Agyare had instructed Banerjee to hydrate Sam right away but to wait for the results of Sam’s lab work before ordering a chest X-ray or the strong antibiotics used to treat sepsis. “””

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Most sepsis alert implementations ironically do block review of the data to see if the sepsis is real, what triggered the alert, and what treatments are appropriate. Part of the sepsis recommendations always proposed by the EMR is to give lots and lots of IV fluids, even if the patient is in decompensated heart failure which would make it worse

but then "He couldn’t figure out how to navigate the template to make some but not all of the auto-populated orders."

The question should be why was he trying to disregard the orders that were part of the standard protocol for a possible sepsis situation - just accept them all as intended.

The system was poorly designed; as pointed out elsewhere: ordering antibiotics before lab results come back is a bad practice. However, the particular sepsis popup required antibiotics to be ordered, and lab results hadn't come back yet, but another procedure (x-ray) needed to be ordered immediately.

People dramatically underestimate how much sepsis protocols and antibiotic stewardship are in tension.

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