Varying Estimates of Sepsis among Adults Presenting to US Emergency Departments: Estimates from a National Dataset from 2002-2018.

The explicit, severe sepsis and qSOFA criteria generated similar annual rates of presentation when applied to US ED encounters, with some evidence of the explicit sepsis cohort being higher acuity. There was minimal overlap of cases and instability in estimates when assessed longitudinally. Our findings inform research efforts to accurately identify sepsis among ED encounters using administrative data.