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Patient Versus Prediction-Level Evaluation of a Dynamic Clinical Prediction Model of Sepsis

Tuttle, M.; Maas, C. C. H. M.; An, J.; Wessler, B. S.; Harvey, W. F.; Selker, H. P.; van Klaveren, D.; Kent, D. M.

2026-05-27 health systems and quality improvement
10.64898/2026.05.26.26354141 medRxiv
Show abstract

The Epic Sepsis Model version 2 (ESMv2) is a prediction model embedded into the electronic medical record used to warn clinicians which hospitalized patients are at risk for sepsis. We conducted a retrospective cohort study of 31,951 hospitalizations of 25,760 patients to compare analyses conducted at the commonly used patient-level (where a maximum prediction prior to the onset of sepsis is used to measure performance) vs novel prediction-level (where each prediction is used to measure performance). Sepsis, defined by the Sepsis 3 criteria occurred during 1,049 hospitalizations (3.3%). Patient-level analyses suggested excellent discrimination AUC 0.86; [IQR 0.85, 0.87], whereas prediction-level analyses demonstrated lower performance AUC 0.62; [IQR 0.57, 0.65]. Low estimates of the positive predictive value (14.5% at the patient level vs 4% at the prediction level) imply a high number of false alerts. Common evaluation approaches may overstate the performance of dynamic prediction models and mislead clinical decision-making.

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