Jessina C McGregor

..05). A revised comorbidity measure specific to resistant infections would likely provide a better assessment of the comorbidity-attributable risk of antibiotic-resistant infections...

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..However, most function with minimal computer support. We evaluated the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a computerized clinical decision support system for the management of antimicrobial utilization...

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..To quantify the value of performing active surveillance cultures for detection of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) on intensive care unit (ICU) discharge...

..Documented prior MRSA colonization or infection was predictive of subsequent MRSA infections (odds ratio, 4.05). Physicians appear to use this documentation when prescribing empirical therapy for suspected bacteremia...

..The outcome of interest for this study was 30-day in-hospital mortality...

..Severity of illness is an important confounder in outcome studies involving infectious diseases. However, it is unclear whether the time at which severity of illness is measured is important...

..06, 95% CI 1.85-5.07). None of the co-colonized patients would have been identified with clinical cultures alone. We report a high prevalence of VRE/MRSA co-colonization upon admission to ICUs at a tertiary-care hospital...

..We aimed to measure the clinical impact of appropriate empiric antibiotic therapy on mortality, while statistically adjusting for comorbidities, severity of illness and presence of virulence factors in the infecting strain...

..We aimed to develop a highly sensitive, simple-to-administer prediction rule to identify subpopulations of patients at high risk for colonization on hospital admission...

..15; 95% CI 1.04-1.27). Coexisting conditions and previous antimicrobial drug exposure are thus predictive of colonization, and a large percentage of these patients have subsequent positive clinical cultures for ESBL-producing bacteria...

..The aim of this study was to quantify potential risk factors for the development of IRPA not due to patient-to-patient transmission...

..We quantified the seasonal variation in the incidences of hospital infection caused by common bacterial pathogens and estimated the association between temperature changes and infection rates...

..The aim of this study was to assess the validity of factors from past medical history in defining patients at high risk for subsequent positive cultures with VRE or MRSA upon hospital admission...

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..However, little is known about the cost-effectiveness of these tools...

..CONCLUSION: On the population level, in vitro S. pneumoniae nonsusceptibility to macrolide or beta-lactam antibiotics was not associated with treatment failure in conditions of probable S. pneumoniae etiology...

..They hope that future medical informatics studies will implement higher level quasi-experimental study designs that yield more convincing evidence for causal links between medical informatics interventions and outcomes...

..74). These data suggest that the use of appropriate empirical therapy, i.e., before susceptibility results are known may not be as critical to patient outcomes as other studies have suggested...

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..aeruginosa respiratory tract infections at our institution. Identifying these risk factors enabled us to develop a prediction tool to assess the risk of resistance and thus guide empirical antibiotic therapy...

..The data strongly suggest that delaying appropriate therapy for approximately 2 days significantly increases the risk of 30-day mortality in patients with P. aeruginosa bloodstream infections...

..In brief, future studies should define "inappropriate" therapy on the basis of in vitro susceptibility data, should separately evaluate empiric and definitive therapy, and should control for the baseline severity of illness...