Real-Time Antibiograms
Generating real-time antibiograms to limit antimicrobial resistance
Opportunity
Inappropriate use of antibiotics in hospitals can lead to antibiotic resistance, which adversely affects morbidity, mortality, length of stay, and cost. Antibiograms - summaries of antibiotic sensitivity rates that identify a bacterial strain's susceptibility to various antibiotics - are used to inform hospital policy guidelines for treating infections. In 2014, antibiogram generation at Penn Medicine required a significant amount of time and effort, with just one report taking several months to create.
Intervention
Penn Medicine's real-time antibiogram software enables health care providers to access real-time interactive data on antibiotic susceptibility and resistance patterns and delivers decision support within the clinician workflow. This software allows providers to monitor the trajectory of infections locally, regionally, within individual health care facilities, and by patient-specific demographics, making it possible to track, prevent, and treat superbug infections more effectively.
Impact
The historical approach of providing antibiogram data to clinicians every nine to 12 months often made the data obsolete as soon as it was made available.
Penn's real-time antibiogram software ensures that the right patient gets the right antibiotic at the right time. By bringing current and local data quickly and directly to prescribers, we have reduced care variations, improved outcomes, limited the spread of antimicrobial resistance, and enabled unit level surveillance to inform more effective interventions.