Tampa General adopts 15-minute blood test to improve sepsis care

Tampa General Hospital has introduced a new rapid blood test designed to help emergency room physicians distinguish bacterial infections from viral ones, the hospital says — an important clue when treating patients suspected of having sepsis. 

The hospital announced Tuesday it is the first academic health system in the Southeast to adopt MeMed BV, an FDA-cleared test that analyzes the body’s immune response and returns results in about 15 minutes.

Sepsis is the body’s extreme response to an infection and is a life-threatening medical emergency, the hospital’s announcement says. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.7 million adults in the U.S. develop sepsis and at least 350,000 of those die during their hospitalization or are discharged to hospice. 

Sepsis can progress rapidly and can be the result of bacterial, viral or other infections, the hospital says, so understanding the underlying cause is critical to helping clinicians make more informed decisions. 

“Sepsis requires us to move quickly, but speed alone isn’t enough,” Michele Moran, senior vice president of Tampa General’s Emergency Services Institute, says in the release. “Our teams also need the most precise information possible to make the right decision for each patient.”

Tampa General incorporated the test into an existing electronic alert system that identifies when emergency department patients may have developed sepsis. MeMed BV measures three immune-system proteins and uses an algorithm to calculate whether an infection is more likely to be bacterial or viral. 

More precise information about whether an infection is bacterial or viral helps ensure that clinicians only give antibiotics to patients who need them while avoiding unnecessary antibiotic exposure when they do not, the hospital says. 

“Sepsis is a clinical emergency, but one of the challenges we face is that its early signs can overlap with many other conditions,” says Dr. Jason Wilson, chair of USF Emergency Medicine and Tampa General’s chief of emergency medicine. “At the point of a sepsis alert, we need to determine quickly whether we are dealing with a bacterial infection that requires multiple doses of intravenous antibiotics and hospitalization or whether another explanation is more likely.”

The decision to adopt MeMed BV came after Tampa General conducted a study of 893 adult patients in its emergency department between September 2024 and October 2025. Researchers found that the test allowed clinicians to reclassify 26% more patients as unlikely to have sepsis, the release says.

Among those who triggered a sepsis alert, the use of a powerful antibiotic called cefepime fell by about 33% while hospitalizations declined by 13%, TGH says. A preliminary analysis estimated savings of about $179,000 for every 100 patients because of fewer admissions and shorter hospital stays.

The research was led by physicians from Tampa General and USF Health, and the results were presented at two national scientific conferences this year. The MeMed BV test is now another tool available to physicians through TGH’s Sepsis Hub — an AI-powered early detection and monitoring system, developed in partnership with software company Palantir Technologies, that uses real-time clinical data to help care teams identify at-risk patients sooner, the hospital says.