Hotspotting sepsis: applying analytic tools from other disciplines to eliminate disparities

A recent manuscript by Moore and colleagues (1) identified geographic disparities in sepsis mortality. Using death certificates obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics, they performed a descriptive analysis of sepsis-related death over a 10-year period [2003–2012]. The investigators used three different approaches to identify mortality clusters (groups of sepsis death) in each of the 3,109 counties in the contiguous United States. They categorized sepsis deaths in each county as strongly clustered, moderately clustered, or nonclustered, based on clustering method agreement (agreement between three methods, two methods, and less than two methods, respectively).