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Sepsis is a significant public health crisis in the United States, contributing to 50% of inpatient hospital deaths. Given its dramatic health effects and implications in the setting of new CMS care guidelines, ED leaders have renewed focus on appropriate and timely sepsis care, including timely administration of antibiotics in patients at risk for sepsis. Modeling the success of multidisciplinary bedside huddles in improving compliance with appropriate care in other healthcare settings, a Sepsis Huddle was implemented in a large, academic ED, with the goal of driving compliance with standardized sepsis care as described in the CMS SEP-1 measure. A retrospective cohort analysis was performed, with the primary finding that utilization of the Sepsis Huddle resulted in antibiotics being administered on average 41 min sooner than when the Sepsis Huddle was not performed. Given that literature suggests that early administration of appropriate antibiotic therapy is a major driver of mortality reduction in patients with sepsis, this study represents a proof of concept that utilization of a Sepsis Huddle may serve to improve outcomes among ED patients at risk for sepsis.

The present paper deals with general problems of ecological terminology and methodology, focussing on the thesis that the imprecise definition of basic terms impedes the scientific development of ecology and its applications in all relevant fields of society. Several problems of practical relevance arise, in particular with the use of different definitions for the same term, with confusion between basic assumptions of definitions and questions of research, with contradictions in basic assumptions within one and the same definition, and with the fact that many definitions are not practicable. Although many authors, especially in the first half of this century, have tried to assess these problems and to establish a sound basis for terminology and methodology in ecology, no satisfactory solution has been found as yet. The main arguments are illustrated with the example of the term “ecosystem”. In the final section of this paper some proposals for an improved terminology and its application in ecological research are presented.