Patients with sepsis can safely be sent home from emergency departments to recuperate under the right conditions with uniform guidelinesaccording to a study published in JAMA Network Open on Thursday.

Researchers led by Dr. Ithan Peltan of the University of Utah School of Medicine and Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare sought to determine the characteristics of people discharged from emergency departments to determine when not admitting sepsis patients might be advisable. The team reviewed electronic health records data from four Intermountain Healthcare hospitals in Utah along with state and federal death records.

“The obvious assumption is that these patients all should be admitted, and we were really, we were worried that these patients might have bad outcomes,” Peltan said.

The study results appear to show those concerns may be exaggerated, and that the discharges happen more frequently than the researchers expected.

“Discharge to outpatient treatment of patients who met sepsis criteria in the ED was more common than previously recognized and varied substantially between ED physicians, but it was not associated with higher mortality compared with hospital admission,” the JAMA article says.

Sepsis patients who were sent home were less sick overall and had more mild cases of organ failure than those admitted on average, the researchers determined. Discharged patients also had lower mortality rates. Any infection can cause sepsis, which can be fatal if not caught quickly . Emerging research indicates that every type of infection presents different sepsis symptoms and varying degrees of danger.

For instance, the odds of a discharged patient having a urinary tract infection was four times higher than other infections. These patients had lower levels of septic shock—which causes dangerous drops in blood pressure—and other markers that pointed to less risk.”

Of more than 12,000 patients admitted to the four hospitals between July 2013 and December 2017, 16% were discharged overall.

But there were wide practice patterns among emergency physicians. Some doctors discharged an average of 8% of sepsis patients while others sent home up to 40% of patients with the condition.

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