REPORTING FROM CCC47
SAN ANTONIO (FRONTLINE MEDICAL NEWS) – Use of a pediatric early warning system reduced the incidence of late ICU admissions among hospitalized pediatric patients, but did not reduce the rate of all-cause hospital mortality, according to results of a large, multicenter trial.
Taken together, the findings of the trial do not support the use of the Bedside Pediatric Early Warning System (BedsidePEWS) to reduce hospital mortality, noted investigator Christopher S. Parshuram, MBChB, DPhil, during a presentation at the Critical Care Congress sponsored by the Society of Critical Care Medicine.
BedsidePEWS is a documentation-based care system that combines a validated severity of illness score, a specialized documentation record, and specific recommendations for care escalation.
The multicenter randomized cluster study, called the EPOCH trial, included 21 hospitals in seven countries that provided inpatient pediatric care. Ten of the hospitals delivered the BedsidePEWS intervention, while the remaining 11 provided usual care. The study data included 144,539 patient discharges comprising 559,443 patient days. Enrollment began Feb. 28, 2011, and ended on June 21, 2015.
For the BedsidePEWS group, all-cause hospital mortality was 1.93 per 1,000 patient discharges, versus 1.56 per 1,000 patient discharges for usual care (adjusted odds ratio, 1.01; 95% confidence interval, 0.61-1.69; P = .96), according to a report on this study that was published in JAMA .
However, the BedsidePEWS group had a significant improvement in the secondary outcome of significant clinical deterioration events, a composite outcome reflecting late ICU admissions.
In the BedsidePEWS group, the rate of significant clinical deterioration events was 0.50 per 1,000 patient-days, compared with 0.84 per 1,000 patient-days at hospitals with usual care (adjusted rate ratio, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.61-0.97; P = .03), the investigators wrote.
The goal of the EPOCH trial was to determine whether BedsidePEWS could reduce rates of all-cause hospital mortality and significant clinical deterioration among hospitalized children, according to the researchers.
“The BedsidePEWS versus usual care did improve processes of care and early detection of critical illness, aligned with the notion of providing the right care, right now,” Dr. Parshuram, associate professor of critical care medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, said during his presentation at the meeting. “Certainly more vital signs were documented, and anecdotally there were reports of culture change.
“However, when we looked further, there was no difference in hospital mortality, nor hospital resource utilization,” Dr. Parshuram added.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded the study. Dr. Parshuram is an inventor of BedsidePEWS and owns shares in a company that is commercializing it.
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SOURCE: Parshuram et al. JAMA. 2018 Feb 27. doi: 10.1001/jama.2018.0948 .