Implementation of satellite blood-culture system in an emergency department: impact of time-to-results in sepsis detection

The aim of this study is to compare the time differences in the detection of sepsis, making a comparison between the TAT (turnaround time) of blood cultures in the Emergency Department (ED) compared to the other hospital units. Positive blood cultures were divided into 2 groups: those from ED, and those from other hospital units. For this reason, a continuously monitoring blood culture incubator has been placed in the ED. We considered only adult patients. During the 1-year study, we considered all positive for each patient. Results obtained demonstrate that placing an automated blood culture system in an area of critical importance allows to obtain significant improvements in terms of time and quality of the results. Furthermore, reduction of TAT is determined more by the times of sample transport rather than the processing time.