Time to antibiotics for septic shock: evaluating a proposed performance measure.

Purposes: International guidelines recommend antibiotics within 1 hour of septic shock recognition; however, a recently proposed performance measure is focused on measuring antibiotic administration within 3 hours of emergency department (ED) arrival. Our objective was to describe the time course of septic shock and subsequent implications for performance measurement.

Basic Procedures: Cross-sectional study of consecutive ED patients ultimately diagnosed with septic shock.