Computerized prompts improve antibiotic selection for patients with abdominal, skin, soft tissue infections
Study finds guidance reduces the selection of harmful extended-spectrum antibiotics
IN THE NEWS: Antibiotic resistance is a major public health threat that makes infections harder to treat and adds risk to surgery and other procedures.
The INSPIRE Abdominal and Skin & Soft Tissue Trials, which involved more than 316,000 patients, found that computerized alerts about the best antibiotic match improved antibiotic selection for patients with abdominal or skin and soft tissue infections.
UCI Health infectious diseases expert Dr. Shruti Gohil, corresponding author of the study, explains to Medscape why this is so important.
“The computerized provider order entry prompts provide real-time information about a patient’s absolute risk of infection due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Normally, information about whether extended or standard spectrum antibiotics are necessary can take days to return. Often clinicians end up choosing extended-spectrum while they await this information. The INSPIRE patient-specific risk estimate gives more information than clinicians currently have to be able to choose standard-spectrum antibiotics at each opportunity, avoiding unnecessary exposure to overly broad-spectrum antibiotics.”
Gohil is a board-certified infectious disease expert, the associate medical director for UCI Health Epidemiology and Infection Prevention and an assistant professor at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. Her clinical interests include hospital epidemiology, infection prevention, communicable disease transmission and multidrug-resistant organism infections.
Gohil has led several national studies to assess patient risk for multidrug-resistant bacterial infections and to prompt physicians to limit the use of extended-spectrum antibacterial drugs in real time. She is a member of The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Society of the Healthcare Epidemiologists in America.
Read additional information about the INSPIRE Abdominal and Skin/Soft Tissue Trials, as well as the editorial explaining the findings.
Medscape: INSPIRE 3 study creates reduction in unnecessary extended spectrum antibiotics ›