Above / In Naperville, the main Edward Hospital campus is located at 801 S. Washington Street.
A program at Edward-Elmhurst Health looking at inpatient antibiotic use and its effects on drug-resistant germs is leading to better patient outcomes and savings in healthcare costs.
Drug-resistant organisms have become a global crisis in the last 10 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes antibiotic resistance as “one of the world’s most pressing health threats.”
Drug-resistant germs cause more than 2 million infections and more than 23,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (ASP)
The CDC, together with the Joint Commission, is requiring all healthcare facilities to implement an Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (ASP) by January 2017 to improve how antibiotics are prescribed. ASPs have been in place at Edward Hospital in Naperville since 2014 and Elmhurst Hospital since 2015.
Why are ASPs being required? The primary cause is antibiotic overuse, both inpatient and outpatient. One result of that overuse has been a surge of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), which can cause severe and potentially deadly cases of diarrhea.
At Edward-Elmhurst Health, Nick Van Hise, Pharm, D., Infectious Diseases Clinical Pharmacist, leads the stewardship program, along with the Medical Directors of Infectious Disease at Edward and Elmhurst hospitals, Jonathan Pinsky, MD, and David Beezhold, MD, respectively.
Through education and revised hospital protocols, the team has decreased mortality and lengths of stay, while saving more than $3 million in healthcare costs.
“These efforts have led to changes in several protocols at Edward-Elmhurst Health, including how the antibiotic Levaquin is being used,” said Van Hise. “Levaquin has been one of the top ten prescribed drugs in the country, leading to increased resistance and ineffectiveness. At Edward-Elmhurst, we’ve decreased its use tenfold and now only use it for targeted infections. We’ve replaced Levaquin with less expensive and more effective antibiotics.”
Why Antimicrobial Stewardship
Antimicrobial stewardship is about improving outcomes, decreasing costs and preventing hospital-acquired infections. Van Hise and colleagues recently published a study in the peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases, that showed they were able to significantly prevent C. difficile in high-risk patients. Edward-Elmhurst is one of the first hospital systems in the country to adopt this practice to prevent C. difficile.
Adds Van Hise, “If new protocols like this can be adopted by other hospitals in the U.S. for one of the most common infections in the world, this will be a game-changer.”
For more information about Edward-Elmhurst’s infection control efforts, visit www.eehealth.org.
News submitted by Keith Hartenberger, Public Information Officer, for Edward-Elmhurst Health.
