Failing the metric but saving lives: The protocolization of sepsis treatment through quality measurement

Quality metrics in the healthcare sector have become a key component of ensuring improved health outcomes and care equity. Alongside the emergence of information technology in healthcare (eg. electronic health records), the primary method utilized to infer “quality” has been the development of measures for healthcare processes and outcomes. Engaging with the specific case of sepsis treatment and sepsis quality metrics, this paper traces how quality is defined, measured, and codified in a 600-bed acute-care hospital in New York City. Sepsis is a severe health condition, primarily managed in the emergency department, that is caused by infection and can result in multi-organ shutdown and mortality. Multiple government agencies have established metrics that regulate New York hospitals based on their compliance with specific sepsis treatment procedures. I draw on data from a 15-month ethnography and in-depth interviews with clinicians and administrators, to show how quality measurement is reshaping the ways healthcare is delivered and organized. I reveal how, at Borough Hospital, efforts to treat sepsis based on quality metrics have constrained clinician expertise, prioritized compliance, and reoriented workflow towards standardized treatment protocols. This reorientation leads to, what I term abstracted surveillance protocols, that increasingly regulate definitions of healthcare quality. I demonstrate that abstracted surveillance protocols enable highly complex clinical processes to be measured based on metric compliance rather than clinical pathways, therefore moving definitions of quality away from the bedside. •Prioritization of sepsis metrics over care processes enables its metrification.•Quality metrics protocolize care for data abstraction and regulatory reporting.•Clinicians are increasingly surveilled for metric compliance.•Abstracted surveillance protocols shift quality care definitions away from bedside.•Hospitals may decrease their sepsis mortality rate but fail the quality metric.