Determining the Cause and Severity of Sepsis with a Point-of-Care Test

Sepsis remains the most costly and lethal diagnosis in U.S. healthcare, accounting for roughly $53 billion in Medicare spending and half of all hospital deaths. Modern definitions describe it as an infection anywhere in the body paired with a dysregulated host response that fuels a self‑perpetuating inflammatory cascade. Traditional diagnostics rely heavily on clinical gestalt and slow microbiology, missing up to 60% of bacterial pneumonias and leading to both overtreatment with antibiotics and dangerous undertreatment. This diagnostic gap fuels high malpractice risk and underscores the urgent need for rapid, objective tools that can differentiate bacterial from viral pathogens while gauging disease severity.

Inflamatics’ FDA‑cleared Triverity test addresses that gap with a point‑of‑care blood assay that delivers three independent scores within 30 minutes: a bacterial infection score, a viral infection score, and an illness‑severity score predicting ICU admission risk. By delivering a holistic picture at triage, clinicians can immediately decide who requires antibiotics, who can be safely discharged, and who needs escalated work‑up for non‑infectious emergencies such as myocardial infarction. Early data show that one in eight patients with confirmed bacterial infections left the emergency department without antibiotics, a gap Triverity aims to close while also reducing unnecessary antimicrobial exposure.

Beyond rapid diagnosis, Triverity’s immune‑profiling platform enables the emerging subtyping of sepsis based on lymphoid and myeloid axis dysregulation. Recent Nature Medicine studies identified four distinct inflammatory phenotypes, each responding differently to immunomodulatory agents. By matching patients to these molecular subtypes, future therapies can be tailored—mirroring oncology’s precision‑medicine breakthroughs—and potentially lower the persistent 20% mortality rate despite protocolized care. For health systems, this means improved outcomes, lower ICU utilization, and a strategic advantage in the evolving critical‑care market.