Since July 2024, sepsis detection criteria and a care path built into UnityPoint Health’s Epic EHR have helped clinicians identify and treat 133 maternal patients with sepsis, enabling earlier intervention and reducing the risk of lifelong complications.
Kristin Ray, UnityPoint’s Director of Clinical Effectiveness, estimates four lives saved each year. “That’s four moms who were able to go home with their babies who would not have otherwise been able to,” she said.
Sepsis is the body’s extreme immune response to infection. It kills 11 million people worldwide every year—more than heart attacks or stroke. Symptoms of maternal sepsis, such as elevated heart rate, often overlap with the normal physiological changes of pregnancy, making sepsis harder for clinicians to detect in pregnant patients. In 2024, sepsis and infection accounted for 14.4% of pregnancy-related deaths. A California state review of pregnancy-associated deaths estimated that 63% of maternal sepsis fatalities could likely have been avoided.[1]
Reducing sepsis deaths has long been a priority at UnityPoint, and the health system has saved an estimated 190 lives by refining its adult sepsis care path and adopting Epic’s Early Detection of Sepsis predictive model. To extend this progress to pregnant and postpartum patients, UnityPoint applied guidelines from the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (CMQCC), which define maternal sepsis as sepsis occurring between 20 weeks of gestation and three days postpartum. UnityPoint embedded pregnancy-specific guidance for these patients, including a sepsis order set with pregnancy-specific monitoring and treatment options.
Nineteen months after implementing the maternal-specific content, UnityPoint’s order set utilization compliance rate improved from 68 to 86%, and maternal patients with sepsis were receiving antibiotics within an hour 66% of the time, compared to 55% before the changes.
Melanie Hermann, a perinatal clinical nurse specialist, said she has seen more awareness of maternal sepsis following rollout of the new criteria and care path as well as clinician and patient education on maternal sepsis. “There’s a higher index of suspicion,” she said. “Doctors come to me and say ‘my patient has sepsis, and we used the order set.’ They’re more aware of it, and they’re proud of the fact that it was identified and appropriately treated, and that the patient got what they needed.”
To learn more about UnityPoint’s maternal sepsis build, check out their Share & Learn article on EpicShare.org, Saving Lives by Detecting Sepsis in Pregnancy: How UnityPoint Reduced Maternal Mortality.
[1] California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative. (n.d.). Sepsis. CMQCC. Accessed on April 8, 2026.
