What is the Most Common Infectious Disease?

John D'Angelo, MD, senior vice president and Executive Director of Emergency Medicine Service at Northwell Health, discusses what he believes to be the most common infectious disease.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“I think the most common thing is something that’s always been there but we’re doing a better job [of] addressing it, and that is the end result of any bad infection, that’s sepsis. That’s been a huge effort of ours, since 2009.

We saw sepsis as our leading contributor [to] mortality in patient mortality. It [is] a disease that had fairly good, evidence-based guidelines for management. We took that on, and over a three- or four-year initiative, part of that being in collaboration with the IHI, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, we’ve dropped our sepsis-mortality across the organization by over 50%, through very aggressive identification and then intervention and a bulk of that work was in our emergency departments.”