Nearly every U.S. hospital screens patients for sepsis, but far fewer have dedicated personnel to ensure screening is successful, the CDC found. Moreover, separate research links a lack of specific accountability to higher mortality.
In its latest annual survey of hospital sepsis programs, covering 2025, the CDC found that 93% of 5,430 hospitals have a standard process to screen for sepsis and 87% use order sets tailored to their patients. But only 36% employ a sepsis coordinator to oversee day-to-day operations, and 32% have support from staff with expertise in data, analytics and information technology.
When it comes to reporting, 31% of hospitals share sepsis data with nursing, physician, unit and hospital leadership at routine intervals. At the remaining two-thirds of U.S. hospitals, that data does not reach leaders on a regular basis.
Sepsis accounts for about 1.7 million adult hospitalizations per year, 350,000 of which end in death or discharge to hospice — more than a third of all hospital deaths, according to the CDC.
The contrast runs throughout the survey. Adoption is high for process steps, including committees that monitor sepsis outcomes at 82% of hospitals, but lower for dedicated staffing. Only 36% pair a physician and a nurse leader or “champion,” and 51% give program leaders enough protected time to run the work.
The CDC’s framework treats those as separate functions. Screening identifies patients in real time; tracking and reporting show whether treatment is working and where it is failing. A hospital can screen every patient and still lack the data to tell whether its program is improving.
A recent study published in the March 2026 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine connects those program elements to survival. Examining 67 Michigan hospitals and 35,777 patients hospitalized for community-onset sepsis, the study found each additional CDC core element a hospital had in place was independently associated with lower risk-adjusted, 30-day mortality.
The core elements score also tracked more closely with real-world sepsis management than the CMS SEP-1 measure did — the process metric hospitals are already required to report. Prior research had questioned whether SEP-1 compliance moves mortality at all.
The correlations were modest, and the authors did not claim causation. Only 30% of the Michigan hospitals had dedicated data and quality-improvement support, which is the same infrastructure gap the CDC survey found.
Some systems have reported sharp reductions after strengthening their sepsis programs. Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health cut sepsis mortality in half, and Baton Rouge, La.-based FMOL Health reduced it by 24%.
The CDC framed the 2025 findings as an opportunity to strengthen leadership structures and data support, and to underscore the need for sepsis prevention among front-line clinicians. According to survey data, screening is now nearly universal. However, the staffing, leadership and reporting structures around it are not.
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