Resident-Driven Quality Improvement Project to Improve Treatment of Status Epilepticus
Christopher Houck1, Joseph Alario2, Micaela Owens3, Joseph Seemiller4
1Neurology, Geisinger Medical Center, 2Geisinger Medical Center, 3Penn State College of Medicine, 4Johns Hopkins Medicine
Objective:

To establish interventions that address barriers to improve the treatment of status epilepticus (SE) at Geisinger Medical Center.

Background:

The American Epilepsy Society Guidelines recommend benzodiazepines (BZ) as first line treatment for seizures lasting greater than 5 minutes and loading antiseizure medications (ASM) in a 20–40-minute window. Delay and underdosing the initial treatment of SE is associated with longer duration of seizures, increased hospital stay, morbidity and mortality. The initial phase of our QI project found that at our institution the main barriers were lack of knowledge of treatment guidelines for SE, timely communication with pharmacy and nursing, and preparation of intravenous ASMs.

Design/Methods:

We implemented the following interventions: 1) educate prescribers in the neurology, emergency medicine, and critical care departments regarding the approved institutional protocol for SE and availability of an orderset with optimal dosing, 2) two-factor communication regarding SE medication orders to nursing and education of nursing and pharmacy staff regarding target administration times, 3) add ready-to-mix levetiracetam to nurse omnicells on high-volume floors, and 4) update the SE orderset to improve usability across multiple departments. We compared the use of appropriate doses of ASMs and time to administration of ASMs before and after the interventions. We analyzed data 9 months after the interventions.

Results:
We has 71 patient's treated for SE during this time period. Use of high-dose BZ in SE increased from 32% to 47%. Use of second line ASMs at appropriate SE doses increased from 77% to 86%. The average BZ order-to-administration time was reduced from 10-14 minutes to 9 minutes and the average second line ASM order-to-administration time was reduced from 86 minutes to 45 minutes.
Conclusions:

Our resident-driven QI project led to improvement in dosing and timing of administration of BZ and second line ASMs. BZ dosing continues to be a major area for improvement.

10.1212/WNL.0000000000204082