WEDNESDAY, March 25, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- The Pediatric Sepsis Event (PSE) electronic health record-based definition for pediatric sepsis has higher sensitivity and comparable specificity to administrative codes, according to a study published online March 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association to coincide with the Society of Critical Care Medicine Congress, held from March 22 to 24 in Chicago.
Chanu Rhee, M.D., M.P.H., from the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in Boston, and colleagues estimated the U.S. national incidence, mortality, and trends of sepsis in nonneonatal children using a PSE definition and routinely captured clinical data in a retrospective cohort study of 3.9 million hospitalizations in two electronic health record datasets. The PSE was validated through medical record reviews of 581 high-risk encounters at three hospitals.
A total of 51,542 sepsis cases were identified among 3,925,809 pediatric hospitalizations from 2016 to 2023 (1.3 percent incidence); 72.6 percent were community-onset and 61.6 percent had septic shock. The researchers found that in-hospital mortality was 10.1 percent; 17.8 percent of hospitalizations that resulted in death had sepsis. On medical record review, the PSE definition had 69.9 and 93.1 percent sensitivity and specificity, respectively, with higher sensitivity and comparable specificity to administrative codes. For 2022, the national estimates were 18,231 sepsis cases and 1,877 deaths. From 2016 to 2022, neither sepsis cases nor deaths changed significantly (annual change, 0.2 and 0.3 percent, respectively).
"These findings underscore the burden of pediatric sepsis and establish a standardized surveillance framework to advance prevention, quality improvement, and policy initiatives," the authors write.