Development of an Electronic Clinical Surveillance Measure for Unnecessary Rapid Antibiotic Administration in Suspected Sepsis

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39360843/ Researchers for an AHRQ-funded study in Clinical Infectious Diseases developed a new sepsis overtreatment surveillance metric and subsequently established the validity and usefulness of electronic health record data–derived criteria. The measure identified a 22.5 percent overtreatment in 113,764 adult patients admitted to the emergency department with suspected sepsis who received intravenous antibiotics within three hours of admission without a blood culture sepsis test. Further, the instrument found that 7.6 percent of patients were overtreated and received antibiotics within one hour after admission. The results showed that the average number of antibiotic days, average length of stay and hospitality mortality rate were all higher for patients who received antibiotic overtreatment, and also showed a higher incidence of Clostridioides difficile infection within six months of discharge.