Same emergency, different odds: the sepsis-care spread

Sepsis kills more Americans than stroke. CMS measures whether hospitals deliver the evidence-based care bundle on time. The national median is 64% — and the gap between the bottom and top tenth of hospitals is 40 points. Same condition, same protocol, very different execution.

64%median bundle compliance

42%10th-percentile hospital

82%90th-percentile hospital

3,106hospitals reporting

If the bottom quartile of hospitals executed the same protocol at the median rate, the improvement would touch hundreds of thousands of sepsis cases a year. The protocol exists. The spread is operational.

Read this carefully: SEP-1 is chart-abstracted and partially documentation-sensitive; case-mix and ED volume matter. The spread, not any single hospital's number, is the finding.

Source: CMS Care Compare, Timely & Effective Care (SEP-1), 3,106 reporting hospitals. Computed 2026-06-12; reproducible from the analysis code against the files hashed on the methodology page.

A 40-point operational spread on identical rules is the recurring story in our data: execution, not regulation, separates organizations — and execution is improvable.

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