On September 18, 2014, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that made addressing antibiotic-resistant bacteria a national security policy.1 This legislation resulted in the creation of a large multidepartment task force to combat the global and domestic problem of antimicrobial resistance. The order required hospitals and other inpatient health care delivery facilities, including the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), to implement robust antimicrobial stewardship programs that adhere to best practices, such as those identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More specifically, the VA was mandated to take steps to encourage other areas of health care, such as ambulatory surgery centers and outpatient clinics, to adopt antimicrobial stewardship programs.1 This order also reinforced the importance for VA facilities to continue to develop, improve, and sustain efforts in antimicrobial stewardship.
Prior to the order, in 2012 the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center (RRVAMC) in Indianapolis, Indiana, implemented an inpatient antimicrobial stewardship program that included thrice-weekly meetings to review inpatient records and make stewardship recommendations with an infectious diseases physician champion and clinical pharmacists. These efforts led to the improved use of antimicrobial agents on the inpatient side of the medical center. During the first 4 years of implementation, the program helped to decrease the defined daily doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics per 1,000 patient days nearly 36%, from 532 in 2012 to 343 in 2015, as well as decrease the days of therapy of fluoroquinolones per 1,000 patient days 28.75%, from 80 in 2012 to 57 in 2015. Additionally, the program showed a significant decrease in the standardized antimicrobial administration ratio, a benchmark measure developed by the CDC to reflect a facility’s actual antimicrobial use to the expected use of a similar facility based on bed size, number of intensive care unit beds, location type, and medical school affiliation.2
While the RRVAMC antimicrobial stewardship team has been able to intervene on most of the inpatients admitted to the medical center, the outpatient arena has had few antimicrobial stewardship interventions. Recognizing a need to establish and expand pharmacy services and for improvement of outpatient antimicrobial stewardship, RRVAMC leadership decided to establish a pharmacist-led outpatient antimicrobial surveillance program, starting specifically within the emergency department (ED).
Clinical pharmacists in the ED setting are uniquely positioned to improve patient care and encourage the judicious use of antimicrobials for empiric treatment of urinary tract infections (UTIs). The CDC’s Core Elements of Outpatient Antibiotic Stewardship recommends pharmacist availability in the ED setting, and previous literature has demonstrated pharmacist utility in ED postdischarge culture monitoring and surveillance.3-5
This article will highlight one such program review at the RRVAMC and demonstrate the need for pharmacist-led antimicrobial stewardship and monitoring in the ED. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that pharmacist intervention would be necessary to prospectively check for “bug-drug mismatch” and assure proper follow-up of urine cultures at this institution. The project was deemed to be quality improvement and thereby granted exemption by the RRVAMC Institutional Review Board.