Revolutionary Approach to Sepsis Treatment, Easy Integration: The Impact of VITEK® REVEAL™ on the Lab at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
By the bioMérieux Editors | Reading time: 2 min
PUBLICATION DATE: August 20, 2026
A conversation with Dr. Joel Mortensen, Director of Diagnostic Infectious Disease Testing Laboratory, and Katie Ruger M.Ed, M (ASCAP), Technical Specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Diagnosing Sepsis in Hours, Not Days
Dr. Joel Mortensen, director of the Diagnostic Infectious Diseases Testing Laboratories at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, explains that his lab does some 20,000 blood cultures each year. Only a fraction are true positives, but for those patients, time is critical.
Sepsis is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for approximately 11 million deaths every year.¹ It’s vital to diagnose sepsis and other bloodstream infections (BSIs) quickly and prescribe optimal antimicrobial therapy. Waiting days for results can potentially delay treatment and potentially cost patients their lives.
That’s why he and his team, including technical specialist Katie Ruger, were looking for a solution that could shave time off that diagnosis.
The answer was VITEK® REVEAL™, a fast antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) solution designed to revolutionize the way clinical teams manage sepsis and other BSIs. With a turnaround time of hours rather than days, VITEK REVEAL is designed to shorten time to targeted therapy and, in the end, improve patient outcomes when time is critical.²
“VITEK REVEAL gives our laboratory the ability to be involved in real time patient care and have a clear, demonstrable impact every day, all the time. And that is revolutionary.”
Ease of Installation and Integration
It’s often time-consuming and difficult for a busy lab to install and integrate a new diagnostic system while also conducting day-to-day business. But Technical Specialist Katie Ruger, who has worked at Cincinnati Children’s for 27 years, says the process of installing and integrating VITEK REVEAL was easy.
She explains they went through a rigorous verification protocol, testing more than 75 organisms, and 500 bug/drug combinations. bioMérieux was there throughout the entire process. She reports it was simple to train the technologists to incorporate it into their daily routine. When it went live, the clinicians began seeing fast results that had real impact on patient care.
“The reason we're a bioMérieux shop is because of the support. We have everyone from sales to marketing to technical. They were here on site helping every step of the way or on the phone. LIS is an endless issue as one tries to bring this kind of system live. But, the constant support to help us get to where we need to be made it so much easier.”
Dr. Mortensen says he believes every lab in the country that does blood culture needs to rely on the kind of fast AST that VITEK REVEAL provides. No clinician should be satisfied to wait a couple of days for critical results when they can get them in hours, he says.
“[VITEK REVEAL] is revolutionary. The impact we can have by shortening the time to the correct antimicrobial agent is stunning.”
VITEK REVEAL helps Dr. Mortensen prescribe the right antimicrobial at the right time, elevating patient care.
References:
- Rudd, KE, et al. (2020). Global, regional, and national sepsis incidence and mortality, 1990-2017: analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study. Lancet (London, England), 395(10219), 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32989-7
- VITEK® REVEAL™ BC GN02-AST Instructions For Use. On file at bioMérieux.
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