Emergency Medicine: Open Access
Open Access

Abstract

Perfusion Measurement of the Septic Patient in the Emergency Department

German Devia-Jaramillo, Jenny Castro-Canoa and Emiro Valverde-Galván

Sepsis is a deadly disease, more complex and frequent every day, that requires management from different specialists. The emergency physician is the first and one of the most important physicians that has to deal with the septic critically ill patients, because an appropriate initial management is key to a favorable outcome. In the emergency department it can be hard to predict which patients will become sicker just with information from the vital signs, and it’s even harder to predict which patients will require a more intensive medical treatment. That is the reason why there must be more resources to measure tissue perfusion in an early and simple way in the emergency room, so that the emergency physician can manage to establish which patients requires earlier intervention to improve their perfusion state, despite not showing any clinically evident signs that help in the diagnosis of their current state. The goal of this paper is to propose a diagnostic and therapeutic algorithm for the hypoperfused patient with septic shock in the emergency department.