UH Rainbow’s Dr. Charles Macias and the Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes Collaborative Honored with John M. Eisenberg Award

Dr. Charles Macias (far right) receiving the John M. Isenberg Award.

CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes (IPSO) Collaborative has received the prestigious John M. Eisenberg Award for National Achievement in Patient Safety and Quality, recognizing outstanding leadership and innovation in reducing pediatric sepsis mortality. The award was announced at the Joint Commission's UNIFY 2025 Convention for Quality in Washington, D.C., honoring the efforts of ISPO and the IPSO co-chairs, including Charles G. Macias, MD, MPH, Chief of Pediatric Emergency Medicine and Chief Quality Officer at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital (UH Rainbow).

Jointly presented by The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum, the Eisenberg Award highlights programs demonstrating impact, innovation, sustainability, replicability, and data-driven success. Each year one Eisenberg National award is named. IPSO's seven-year initiative involved 66 children's hospitals implementing evidence-based care bundles and leveraging automated electronic health record (EHR) data to improve sepsis recognition and reduce mortality from 2.2% to 1.5%.

The IPSO Collaborative has saved hundreds of pediatric lives, reduced more than 70,000 hospital days, and nearly 40,000 ventilator days to name a few remarkable accomplishments. The collaborative also successfully eliminated disparities related to the Child Opportunity Index and created the largest pediatric sepsis dataset, analyzing over 100,000 episodes across diverse care settings.

The award panel praised IPSO's impressive scale, collaborative approach, sustainability, replicability, and rigorous data methodology. Though the initiative concluded in 2023, its impact endures through publicly available resources, ongoing data tracking, and active collaboration within the Children's Hospital Association.

UH Rainbow's quality and safety team, providers, and staff have been exemplary in this IPSO sepsis work achieving an over 2-year period without any sepsis mortality for pediatric hospital identified sepsis cases. These pediatric trigger tools, huddle strategies and other electronic decision support tools have been spread across the entire UH system's emergency departments with ongoing iterative improvements.

Dr. Macias has been a key leader in the country in advancing healthcare quality through data-driven analytics, and innovative care models. Dr. Macias joined UH Rainbow in 2019, and under his leadership UH Rainbow has developed a comprehensive strategic plan focused on quality, safety, and equity in pediatric care, including training programs for clinical staff, building systemwide pediatric disease registries for chronic diseases like asthma and diabetes, and integration of artificial intelligence to predict and prevent sepsis.

This recognition of Dr. Macias, Children's Hospital Association and the IPSO Collaborative underscores their national impact on pediatric patient safety and quality care, setting a standard for innovations that improve outcomes and equity for children across the United States.