Unnecessary antibiotic use ups avoidable healthcare costs

Widespread use of unnecessary and duplicative antibiotics in US hospitals could have led to an estimated USD 163 million in potentially avoidable healthcare costs, scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have found.
The inappropriate use of antibiotics can increase risk to patient safety, reduce the efficacy of these drugs and drive up avoidable healthcare costs, researchers said.
"The overuse of antibiotics is an industry-wide public health issue that is occurring across all care settings," said Leslie Schultz, the lead author of the study and director of the Premier Safety Institute, Premier, Inc.
"Sometimes in an effort to 'do whatever it takes' to fight a serious infection, clinicians use multiple antibiotics to treat the same infection.

"This practice can contribute to antimicrobial resistance, put patient safety at risk and increase costs. We hope these findings help to enhance the antimicrobial stewardship initiatives that the majority of US hospitals already have in place today," Schultz said.
Researchers found that 70 per cent of potential unnecessary therapies represented three specific drug combinations used to treat anaerobic infections.

The drug combination metronidazole and piperacillin-tazobactam accounted for more than 50 per cent of the variation.
Researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of inpatient pharmacy data from more than 500 US hospitals from 2008-2011 to identify the potential inappropriate usage of 23 intravenous antimicrobial combinations.

The analysis showed that 78 per cent of hospitals had evidence of potentially unnecessary combinations of antibiotics being administered for two or more days, with a total of 32,507 cases of redundant antibiotics treatment.
Overall, these cases represented 148,589 days of potentially inappropriate antibiotic therapy, resulting in nearly USD 13 million in potentially avoidable healthcare costs from antimicrobial drugs, alone.
If these cases were representative of all US hospitals over the same time period, an estimated USD 163 million could have been saved through appropriate prescribing.
"Improving the way antibiotics are prescribed not only helps reduce rates of Clostridium difficile infection and antibiotic resistance, but can also improve individual patient outcomes, all while reducing healthcare costs," said Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for Healthcare Associated Infection Prevention Programmes in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study is published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA).