Sepsis is one of the deadliest conditions a hospital patient can encounter. St. Luke’s University Health Network, based in Bethlehem, Pa., is one of the nation’s leaders in helping to prevent it.
St. Luke’s uses a dynamic mix of both human and artificial intelligence (AI) monitoring to achieve some of the best sepsis compliance and sepsis survival rates in the nation.
“We utilize the Epic Sepsis Model – predictive AI – in the background, along with programming engineered by St. Luke’s, to monitor every patient every moment of the day for rising risk,” said Charles Sonday, St. Luke’s Associate Chief Medical Information Officer. “If a patient rises above a certain threshold … an alert goes to both the provider and the nurse to examine that patient and begin treatment.”
This unique approach to preventing and treating sepsis is one of the factors that contributed to the Network being ranked #1 nationwide in quality, safety and patient experience by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Across the Network, every patient in a medical-surgical unit is monitored around the clock. The vital signs, lab results, nursing notes and more are transmitted to a virtual response center staffed by registered nurses. When a patient starts meeting certain metric parameters, the care team knows long before it becomes an ICU emergency.
With survival rates climbing and unexpected ICU transfers declining, St. Luke’s is showing what real world responsible medical AI looks like: always on and keeping patients safer without replacing the humans who care for them.
St. Luke’s has engineered the use of these tools – combined with hands-on human response – to achieve top 10% results nationally in sepsis performance. St. Luke’s fiscal year sepsis bundle compliant rate as determined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was just under 88% compared to the national average of 64% and the Pennsylvania average of 61%.
“The sepsis bundle is a list of elements that focus on very timely metrics,” explained Diana Tarone, St. Luke’s Senior Network Director of Quality. “We are checking to see if the patient is hypotensive and needs a vasopressor, what antibiotics are administered. It is a constant and consistent watching, monitoring and reassessing of the patient.”
At the virtual response center – located off-site, simultaneously serving all St. Luke’s hospital campuses – an array of computer monitors lists the patients and their vital signs, with the most at-risk rising to the top.
“It’s a very complex list of factors and there has to be a lot of communication between the physician team, the advanced practitioner team and the nursing team,” said Dr. Jennifer Axelband, St. Luke’s Associate Medical Director of Critical Care Education. “We use AI monitoring in the background to help us stay compliant with these bundles because statistics show that if you stay compliant with the metrics established by CMS, it decreases patient mortality by 30%.
About St. Luke’s
Founded in 1872, St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) is a fully integrated, regional, non-profit network with annual net revenue of more than $4.5 billion. With 23,000+ employees at 16 hospital campuses and 350+ outpatient sites, it is the Lehigh Valley’s biggest employer.
The Network’s service area includes 11 counties in two states: Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital is based at the Bethlehem Campus.
Dedicated to advancing medical education, St. Luke’s is the preeminent teaching hospital in central-eastern Pennsylvania. In partnership with Temple University, the Network established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school. It also operates the nation’s oldest continuously operated School of Nursing, established in 1884, and 60+ fully accredited graduate medical educational programs with 550+ residents and fellows.
In 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ranked St. Luke’s #1 – ahead of Houston Methodist and Mayo Clinic, two of the nation’s most prestigious institutions – as the nation’s top health system for quality, safety and patient experience. This objective recognition, based on public data reported to the government, reaffirms St. Luke’s preeminent position as THE BEST OF THE BEST among the most respected health care systems in the United States.
St. Luke’s has been named a Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades Top Hospital and a Newsweek World’s Best Hospital. It is the only Lehigh Valley-based health care system to earn Medicare’s five-star ratings (the highest) for quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction. In 2025, the Network earned straight A’s from Leapfrog across all of its acute care hospitals. It has earned 100 Top Hospital designations from Premier 11 years in a row, including in 2021 when its flagship University Hospital was identified as THE #1 TEACHING HOSPITAL IN THE COUNTRY. Utilizing the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system for both inpatient and outpatient services, the Network is a multi-year recipient of the Most Wired award recognizing the breadth of SLUHN’s information technology applications such as telehealth, online scheduling and online pricing information.
Information provided to TVL by:
Sam Kennedy
