A study presented at the American College of Emergency Physicians meeting has shown that Cytovale’s IntelliSep test can help hospitals improve compliance with the US SEP-1 quality measure by enabling earlier sepsis risk stratification and more precise documentation.

Researchers at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, reported a 28.9% relative increase in SEP-1 performance after integrating IntelliSep into emergency department protocols. SEP-1, a mandatory quality metric from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, measures compliance with sepsis care bundles and is tied to financial penalties and incentives.

Christopher Thomas, vice president and chief quality officer at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, said: “Unlike traditional approaches that may boost SEP-1 performance by broadly applying sepsis protocols—often at the cost of overtreatment—we integrated IntelliSep into our sepsis protocol to gain objective insight into sepsis risk, ensuring we deliver the SEP-1 bundle to the right patients from the start.” He added that the approach “yielded significant results, enabling OLOL to achieve meaningful compliance gains in a short time.”

The study analysed 598 patients discharged with sepsis codes over a six-month period. Compliance rose from 61.2% in July 2024 to 78.9% in December 2024. The hospital achieved these improvements by combining IntelliSep testing at triage with enhanced documentation tools within the electronic health record.

IntelliSep is an FDA-cleared test that takes around eight minutes and measures a patient’s immune response to infection. OLOL clinicians used the results to stratify risk: high-risk patients received early sepsis interventions, while those at low risk could be managed differently. The addition of “dot phrases” in the electronic health record allowed clinicians to reference the test result directly, streamlining documentation for SEP-1 compliance.

Hollis O’Neal, medical director of research at OLOL, said: “IntelliSep, which looks at a patient’s immune dysregulation, has been a critical tool in helping us quickly identify patients during our initial ED triage who otherwise didn’t ‘look septic.’ That early identification helps us not only deliver timely care to the right patients, but also document the risk of sepsis clearly so we receive credit from CMS—all while reducing unnecessary use of blood cultures and other resource-intensive diagnostics.”

The authors noted that hospitals across the US are under pressure to balance compliance with patient-centred care. They said host-response testing such as IntelliSep could offer a path to improving outcomes, optimising resources, and meeting regulatory standards simultaneously.