Background: In 1992, the first consensus definition of severe sepsis was published.
Subsequent epidemiologic estimates were collected using administrative data, but ongoing
discrepancies in the definition of severe sepsis produced large differences in estimates.
Objectives: We seek to describe the variations in incidence and mortality of severe sepsis in
the United States using four methods of database abstraction. We hypothesized that different
methodologies of capturing cases of severe sepsis would result in disparate estimates of …