Analytics Used To Track Antibiotic Resistance
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Real-time software has the potential to assess antibiotic stewardship.
MedCity News highlights Dan Peterson, an epidemiologist and entrepreneur who started Teqqa, a company helping physicians and healthcare facilities decide which antibiotics they should prescribe for their patients. Its first product — iAntibiogram — is an analytics tool for clinical decision support, and it comes on the heels of the Obama administration’s push to improve antibiotic stewardship.
In collaboration with Penn Medicine, Teqqa has developed a technique that could revolutionize the way antibiotics are tracked and prescribed in clinical settings. The a new software platform and mobile app aims to encourage appropriate antibiotic use by providing real-time data to clinicians, and minimize the risk of dangerous pathogens developing resistance to life-saving antibiotics.
The resistance of bacteria to commonly-used antibiotics has been increasing at an alarming rate, and resistance patterns vary internationally, nationally, regionally, and locally. These differences matter — a drug that is effective against a life-threatening bacterial infection at one hospital may be much less effective at another, and appropriate stewardship of antibiotic drugs is essential to slowing the growing resistance.
Understanding these patterns, particularly within a given hospital, is essential to determine the best methods to track, prevent, and treat these infections. Without a clear, real-time and accurate understanding of drug sensitivity and resistance patterns within individual hospitals and the community, however, physicians typically choose antibiotics empirically, potentially contributing to resistance and poor patient outcomes.
“The appropriate use of antibiotics to treat infections depends on knowing what antibiotics kill which bacteria, “ said Keith Hamilton, MD, associate director of Healthcare Epidemiology, Infection Prevention and Control and director of Antimicrobial Stewardship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “Predicting and understanding the trends and patterns of resistance allows clinicians to choose appropriate medications to treat a patient’s infection, and provides the health system real, actionable data to make broad recommendations for use of these life-saving drugs.”
“This innovative software has the potential to improve patient outcomes and resistance patterns in hospitals across the country by allowing practitioners to understand the behavior of infections locally, regionally and most importantly, within their healthcare facilities,” said Patrick J. Brennan, MD, chief medical officer for the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “This is an important step in more effectively designing interventions to control and treat these infections.”