• J Gen Intern Med · Aug 2021

    Impact of Clinical Decision Support on Azithromycin Prescribing in Primary Care Clinics.

    • Alexandria May, Allison Hester, Kristi Quairoli, Jordan R Wong, and Sheetal Kandiah.
    • Department of Pharmacy, Grady Health System, Atlanta, GA, USA. avmay@gmh.edu.
    • J Gen Intern Med. 2021 Aug 1; 36 (8): 2267-2273.

    BackgroundInappropriate use of antibiotics in the outpatient setting is a common problem, yet literature evaluating best practices for stewardship interventions in this setting is sparse.ObjectiveTo evaluate the impact of clinical decision support (CDS) order panels for azithromycin prescribing on the percentage of inappropriate azithromycin prescriptions in primary care clinics.DesignSingle-center, retrospective analysis of azithromycin prescribing within nine primary care clinics. Pre-intervention and post-intervention data included azithromycin prescriptions from November 2016 to April 2017 and February 2019 to July 2019, respectively. Key exclusion criteria included prescriptions for the treatment of a sexually transmitted infection or for prophylaxis against Mycobacterium avium complex.InterventionThe azithromycin CDS panel was created to provide point-of-care information on appropriate use of azithromycin along with recommended alternatives based on indications. CDS panels were implemented on January 10, 2019.Main MeasuresThe primary composite outcome was the change in the percentage of inappropriate azithromycin prescribing before and after implementation of CDS panels. The composite outcome included prescriptions with inappropriate indications for azithromycin, unnecessary prescriptions, inappropriate treatment durations, and/or inappropriate dose.Key ResultsThere were 306 and 263 prescriptions for azithromycin prescriptions included for analysis in the pre- and post-intervention periods, respectively. Inappropriate prescriptions decreased by 12.6% from the pre- to post-intervention period (81.4% vs. 68.8%; P < 0.001). In both the pre- and post-intervention period, bronchitis and unspecified upper respiratory tract infections (URI) were the two most common indications where azithromycin was prescribed inappropriately.ConclusionsImplementation of CDS order panels resulted in a reduction in inappropriate azithromycin prescribing. However, additional improvement in azithromycin prescribing is needed especially for the indications of bronchitis and unspecified URI.© 2021. Society of General Internal Medicine.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…